The Silver Wolf

Rome in the eighth century, decayed and dangerous, where Regeane is a young noblewoman being traded into a political marriage and is also, secretly, a werewolf. Borchardt (a sister of Anne Rice, and a considerable writer in her own right) treats the shapeshifting as inheritance rather than curse, and gives Regeane a wolf’s point of view as fully as her human one. The prose is lush and the period is filthy.