** spoiler alert ** Anne Rice's mythmaking shines in The Wolf Gift, but that's about the only redeeming factor.

The protagonist, Reuben, is a trust-fund baby who drives a Porsche and can buy a mansion at the ripe old age of twenty-three. I would expect this sort of set-up in comic books, not from Anne Rice. It's too easy, having all that money to toss around, and he is thoroughly spoiled by his creator in other regards as well.

I noticed parallels between Reuben's beginning as a werewolf and the circumstances of Louis and Lestat in the first two novels of the Vampire Chronicles. Rice apparently likes to leave her heroes without suitable mentors (which is a theme I enjoy), but she wraps it all up in a bow for Reuben at the end of the Wolf Gift. The last chapters also reminded me of the meeting of the elder vampires at the end of The Queen of the Damned.

The moral struggles of being a vigilante seem thin and inconsequential set in Reuben's posh world, especially since the ability to unfailingly detect evil is already worked out for him.

I think Reuben's elder brother would make a more compelling protagonist - a priest born with a silver spoon in his mouth who gives it all up for the priesthood and then has to cope with his brother's supernatural secret. His mother also sounds like an interesting character with some juicy internal conflicts to mine. Reuben? Not so much. Prior to becoming a supernatural being, his major conflict is that everyone babies him.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is a failure to understand why in the world two older women hook up with Reuben within hours of meeting him. The first one, well, OK, I guess that could happen. (But then she wills him a house! What?!) The second one wrecked my suspension of disbelief. What kind of woman has sex with a wolf man who just happens to show up in her yard one night? That would be some interesting psychology to explore in fiction. But Rice doesn't go there, she leaves that unexplained and puzzling.

The Wolf Gift definitely counts as a fantasy book, but it lacks the depth and complexity I enjoy in Rice's prior books.