Children of Wolves by Lawrence Osborne

Published by Simon & Schuster/Summit Books on August 25, 2026

Children of Wolves echoes the rhythms of a classic spy novel. The protagonist, Tyler Sedgewick, is not a government agent, but his mundane career as a private investigator for Cyclops Eye has largely involved spying on unfaithful spouses. He prefers international assignments — he traveled to Brazil for an insurance fraud investigation and to Monaco in a case that involved an illegitimate American love child — but his stagnating career has focused on work near Chicago.

Tyler gets his wish for work with international intrigue when James Arthur Knight Jr., a wealthy businessman, asks Cyclops to assign Tyler to find his daughter Chana. “Chana was the fruit of Knight’s marriage to a wealthy Turkish society girl and as a result she had grown up both in Turkey and her father’s country.” Knight believes Chana has traveled to Turkey. He knows that Tyler attended Groton at the same time as David Meltzer, the American consul in Istanbul, and believes that connection might help Tyler find Chana. Tyler barely knew Meltzer but he’s willing to pretend otherwise if the deception scores him an international assignment.

Knight wants Tyler to befriend his daughter and “find out what is making her embrace her own disappearance.” Knight wants information about his daughter but doesn’t seem particularly interested in intervening in her life. He was something of a hands-off father as his troublesome daughter was growing up, having sent her to a therapy boarding school, “one of those places where problem children of the rich go to have some discipline beaten into them and to get out of their drug addictions.” While there, Chana used her trust fund money to buy a dilapidated house so that her friend Adam could burn it down.

The third person narration initially shadows Tyler as he hangs out in Turkey, using his expense money to visit bars and beaches while keeping a half-hearted eye out for Chana. He eventually encounters an American woman named Aylin who is the right age to be Chana. Although he is more than a decade older, Tyler befriends Aylin and her friend Adam.

Another couple, Diane and Marco, have been traveling with Aylin and Adam. Tyler realizes that they are “old friends living an opted-out alternative existence far off the American radar – but with enough private money to make it interesting to themselves.”

Adam is in the business of selling sketchy artwork to Russians. One of his clients was invited to a party that Meltzer will attend. Adam uses that connection to get Tyler back in touch with Meltzer. They hit it off and Tyler eventually gets his four young friends invited to a banquet at which Meltzer will be giving a speech.

All of this is interesting, but it isn’t clear where the story is heading. At the midway point, the narration begins to follow the younger characters. We learn that they share a radical philosophy and firmly believe that an act of violence can change the world. The story leads to that violent act, one that seems to place Tyler in the middle of a conspiracy to commit a political assassination. It appears that the heart of the story will explore the pickle that Tyler is in when a Turkish intelligence officer believes him to be at the center of a crime, but Lawrence Osborne takes the story in a different and less interesting direction.

I enjoyed Children of Wolves despite its shortcomings. I became a quick fan of Osborne’s straightforward prose style: just enough description to create strong characters and a convincing atmosphere without slowing the story’s pace. Osborne creates an admirable sense of intrigue, but I was disappointed that he failed to deliver the dramatic climax that seemed to be the novel’s endpoint. The story follows a couple of secondary characters to their demises but fizzles out as to the central characters. I appreciated Osborne’s effort to avoid a trite or predictable ending, but the ending he settled upon is dissatisfying.

While Osborne took great pains to build credible characterization, he succeeded only with regard to Tyler. I never quite bought into the notion that four rich kids would respond to their parents’ emotional neglect by deciding to become anarchists. And even if all four embraced the same philosophy, I never believed they would convince themselves that a random act of political violence would change the world in a positive way, or that they would put their own lives at risk to make that change. Notwithstanding the novel’s faults, the story’s gripping nature and strong atmosphere sufficed to earn my recommendation.

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