opening lines:
Caridad waited near the road in a small clearing some distance from her village.

There are good werewolf novels, of course - The Werewolf of Paris and The Wolfen leap immediately to mind - but mostly they're pretty poor. This one at least attempts to ring the changes by locating it within a Filipino mythology, but the net result is to bore a reader to tears. Too much time is spent on a travelogue and on making sure the research is visible, and too little on getting a decent storyline going. Frankly I don't care much about how rice is cooked in the Philippines, and although I'm happy to be told that an aswang is a local variation on the werewolf myth, I still need a glimmer of original narrative to keep me going.

I quite like the cover though.