Children of the Wolf by Abby Geni: A literary mystery about family, mythology, and inherited violence

Some families pass down recipes, heirlooms, and old photographs. Liv’s family passes down stories of gods, bloodshed, and a violent legacy she has spent her entire adult life trying to escape. Abby Geni’s Children of the Wolf, releasing September 15, 2026, is one of those novels that feels like an elaborate tapestry: dazzling threads in thousands of colors, each one carefully woven into the next until the final piece is something far more intricate and awe-inspiring than you could have imagined from the individual strands. At its heart, it is a story about loving a serial killer—and about whaeddt happens when the person you love turns out to be someone you should have feared.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that Liv’s father, Ulf, is a serial killer. The novel gives us enough clues to understand what is happening during Liv’s childhood even while Liv herself fails to recognize the signs until long after she has grown up and escaped her father’s control. And that distinction is important. Children of the Wolf isn’t really a story about discovering that Ulf is a killer. It is a story about what it means to have loved him.

A childhood shaped by the Old Gods

As children, Liv and her brother Finn are raised by Ulf, a Swedish-born descendant of Erik the Red who has constructed an entire worldview around his Viking heritage. The children are homeschooled. They speak Swedish. They learn swordplay and archery. They celebrate Norse holidays and worship the Old Gods, complete with blood sacrifices.

It could be easy for a story like this to turn Ulf’s beliefs into a kind of exotic backdrop or simply another indication that he is dangerous. Instead, Geni incorporates Norse mythology so seamlessly into the story that it becomes part of the novel’s very foundation.

What I particularly loved is that the mythology isn’t treated simply as a religion the family follows. For Ulf, it is a way of life. His paganism is about acknowledging the world as it is rather than imposing a human-made system of meaning upon it. Time is marked by the sun and moon rather than by a calendar humans have devised. Life, death, and rebirth are all part of an inevitable cycle. We are all bound to the Wheel of Life; Ulf and his children simply choose to acknowledge it.

The children are immersed in these ideas from an early age, and Ulf frequently reads to them from the Norse Eddas, teaching them the old stories alongside everything else he believes they need to know. Those stories become another part of the strange, insular world of their childhood. To Liv, they aren’t simply ancient myths. They are the stories through which she learns to understand the world.

That becomes particularly important because Geni doesn’t just use Norse mythology as a thematic layer. She uses it to structure the entire novel. The story is built around the Norns: Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld, the three female figures who sit beside the Well of Urd at the base of Yggdrasil, the world tree, weaving the destinies of gods and humans. Urd represents the past and what has already happened. Verdandi represents the present and what is coming into being. Skuld represents the future and what is yet to come.

The novel follows that same progression. The first section takes us into the past, showing us Liv’s childhood and the world Ulf created for his children. The middle section brings us into the present, where Liv is living in Haven and beginning to recognize a disturbing pattern in the disappearances around her. And the final section offers a glimpse into what will be. This structure worked incredibly well for me because it reinforces one of the novel’s central questions: How much of our future is determined by what has already happened?

Liv has spent twenty years trying to escape her past, but the past doesn’t stay where she left it. One of the ways Geni makes that point particularly effectively is through something as simple as a locked door. Liv’s new love interest, Penny, has a locked door in her house, and Liv is immediately reminded of the locked door in her childhood home. That door led to a room where Liv would eventually learn that terrible things had happened while she slept upstairs.

A locked door is such an ordinary thing. But for Liv, it carries the weight of everything she knows and everything she doesn’t know. It is a physical reminder that there are things happening behind closed doors that we cannot see—and that sometimes the truth about our own lives is waiting on the other side of a door we were never allowed to open.

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The stories we inherit

One of the mythological tales Ulf shares with his children is the story of Ragnarök. It is essentially the Norse version of an apocalypse, a little like the Christian concept of Armageddon, but the details make it particularly fascinating: A dead witch foretells an influx of storms followed by an endless winter. Rivers will run with poison. Stars will fall from the sky. The world as the characters know it will be destroyed.

It’s the kind of story that could easily be dismissed as a fairy tale rather than mythology—a frightening story told to children about the end of the world. But I couldn’t help wondering whether there might be something buried inside it that was once history.

What if some ancient ancestors really did witness a catastrophic event? An asteroid striking the earth, perhaps, followed by environmental upheaval or even an ice age? What if an actual disaster became a story, and then the story was passed down through generations until history became mythology? Were those ancient storytellers warning their descendants that because something had happened once, it could happen again?

If you’ve read my series on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins, you already know that I’m fascinated by the way history can become distorted as it is narrated across generations. So naturally, this aspect of Children of the Wolf was catnip for me.

And it fits beautifully with what Geni is doing structurally with the Norns. The past informs the present, and the present carries the possibility of becoming the future. The stories we inherit aren’t necessarily accurate records of what happened, but they still shape how we understand what might happen next.

The bees (and the “wanna-bees”)

I also couldn’t help connecting with Liv’s work as a beekeeper. As someone who has written a novel with a beekeeper protagonist, I love any opportunity to fall down the beekeeping rabbit hole again through someone else’s story. I even found myself wondering whether Geni is a beekeeper herself—or, like me, a “wanna-bee.” Based on her comments in the author’s note, it appears the latter may be true.

The bees are an important part of Children of the Wolf, but they never take over the story. They function much like the Norse mythology: they’re woven into the larger narrative so naturally that you don’t necessarily realize how important they are until you step back and look at the whole picture.

And because I have spent an unreasonable amount of time learning about bees without ever actually becoming a beekeeper, I had one particularly satisfying moment toward the end when the book reveals what happened to the bees in Ulf’s apiary: I knew it! That is a very specific kind of reader satisfaction, and I cherished it.

The complicated monster

But the part of Children of the Wolf I found most compelling is the way Geni handles Ulf himself. It’s interesting how a serial killer who works as a hit man can somehow be more palatable to an audience than a killer who murders solely for pleasure. We can construct a moral distinction around the hit man. He has a reason. He has rules. He chooses his victims according to some kind of code.

Ulf is much more complicated than that. He is a man the reader has every reason to fear. We know what he has done. We know he tortured his victims. And yet there is something almost perversely comforting about discovering that he does have a moral code when it comes to choosing them. There is this horrible little sense of relief: Well, at least he didn’t do that. And that’s where Geni gets us.

We find ourselves comparing the monster we thought Ulf was with the monster he could have been. We begin to look for mitigating circumstances. We start forgiving him—not necessarily for everything he has done, but perhaps for more than we should.

And then there is the question of what he does to his own children. That makes everything even more complicated because loving a monstrous person doesn’t necessarily mean believing the monster is good. Liv’s love for her father exists alongside her fear of him, her anger at him, and her understanding of what he has done. Those emotions don’t cancel each other out. They coexist.

That’s one of the things that makes Liv such an interesting character. She isn’t simply trying to solve a mystery about missing men. She’s trying to determine whether the violence she sees around her is repeating itself—and whether the part of her that recognizes that violence means she has inherited something from her father.

A mystery built on a lifetime of fear

Twenty years after the FBI raid that tore her childhood apart, Liv has constructed a quiet life for herself and Finn in Haven, Michigan. She has changed her last name, works with bees, and tries to live in a world that has very little resemblance to the one Ulf created for her. Then men begin disappearing.

At first, the pattern is easy to dismiss. But Liv notices. And once she starts tallying the disappearances, she sees similarities to her father’s crimes that other people don’t. That puts her in an impossible position. Is she recognizing a real pattern because she has a unique understanding of violence? Or is she projecting the past onto the present because she can never completely escape what happened to her?

Should she involve Finn? Should she tell Penny, the mysterious woman who has entered her life? Should she walk away and protect the quiet existence she’s worked so hard to build? Or should she do something?

The mystery works because it is never simply about who is making men disappear. Every new question forces Liv to confront another piece of her own history. The investigation becomes a reckoning with the person she was, the person her father wanted her to be, and the person she has chosen to become.

And Geni manages to bring all of those threads together without making the novel feel as though it is juggling a dozen unrelated ideas. The mythology, the bees, the disappearances, Liv’s childhood, her relationship with Finn, her relationship with Penny, Ulf’s violence, and the question of inherited identity all belong to the same tapestry.

Literary depth without literary fussiness

There is another thing I particularly appreciated about Children of the Wolf, and it is something I find myself saying again and again about truly good literary fiction: literary does not have to mean difficult to read. This is one of those rare novels that proves the point.

There is an enormous amount to think about here. You can dig into the mythology, the structure, the nature of fate, generational trauma, the stories we inherit, the ways people rationalize violence, and the question of whether we are capable of escaping the identities other people construct for us. There are great depths here for a reader who wants to dive into them. But if you simply want to be entertained by a compelling mystery about a woman investigating a string of disappearances while confronting the terrifying legacy of her childhood, you can do that too.

Geni never sacrifices clarity for profundity. The writing is accessible without being simplistic, and the ideas are substantial without becoming an obstacle to the story. A reader can think deeply about this novel, or simply let it carry them along. The author is an expert at providing both experiences.

A satisfying ending to a complicated story

The hardest thing about writing a story this complex is sticking the landing. There are so many opportunities for a novel like this to collapse under the weight of its own ideas. A mystery can overwhelm the character story. The mythology can feel like decoration. The family drama can swallow the thriller. Or the ending can become so tangled in trying to explain everything that it loses the emotional impact of everything that came before it. Children of the Wolf avoids those problems.

The ending felt almost inevitable—not predictable, but inevitable. It was almost as though there was only one way this story could end, and Geni had been quietly leading us toward it all along. And perhaps that’s the greatest strength of the novel. By the time we reach the end, we understand that the mystery Liv has been trying to solve was never just about the missing men. It was about her father, her childhood, her own capacity for understanding violence, and the stories we inherit from the people who raise us.

Sometimes escaping a legacy doesn’t mean pretending it never existed. Sometimes it means looking directly at it and deciding what you will carry forward—and what you will leave behind.

Children of the Wolf is a beautifully constructed, unsettling novel about family, mythology, violence, memory, and the complicated ways we can love people who don’t deserve our love. It’s a mystery, but it’s also something much more expansive: a story about the stories we inherit and the ones we eventually choose to tell ourselves.

If you enjoy literary mysteries with complicated characters, unsettling family histories, mythology woven into the narrative, and stories that leave you thinking about them long after you’ve finished reading, Children of the Wolf is absolutely worth putting on your September reading list.

What do you think about the way Children of the Wolf uses mythology—not just as part of the story, but as a framework for understanding Liv’s past, present, and future? And do you think the stories we inherit from our families have more power over us than we realize? Tell me what you think in the comments!

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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