• Publisher: Beletrina
• Author: Irena Svetek
• Original title: Beli volk

The naked body of a young woman lies abandoned in the overgrown ancient forest of Kočevski Rog. Someone has slit her throat. On her face she is wear- ing a mask shaped like the head of a wolf, iron bars in place of its mouth. Forensic pathologist Patrik Valbureto establishes that the victim had been raped and notices a human bite mark on her shoulder. State prosecutor Mio Aurelli and his team need to find out who the murdered girl is and figure out the significance of the white wolf mask. The investigation leads them to the region of White Carniola where Aurelli had spent the previous summer with his former wife Viola, and to the town of Kočevje, where the victim worked at the Society for the Protection of the Kočevje Wolf.

Aurelli meets Perun and Mokoš, the parents of the murdered woman who are hiding a big family secret, and when another body is found in a cavern in the middle of the Kočevje forest, the story of forbidden love and sins of the ancestors slowly begins to unravel.

 White Wolf is the second in the series of psychological crime novels by Irena Svetek, this time the framework of the story is pinned to ancient Slavic mythological tradition.

About the author

Irena Svetek

Irena Svetek (1975) holds a doctorate from the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts. Her first novel Close Up (Od blizu) won her the 2004 Best Debut Award of the Slovenian Book Fair and a nomination for the Kresnik Award for best novel

of the year. She is also author of the novels Seventh Wave (Sedmi val, 2011) and Go to Sleep, My Child, Go to Sleep (Zaspi, mala moja, zaspi, 2014). In recent years she has been mostly scriptwriting and has written the screenplays for numerous films, TV series and programmes. In 2021 she published the first in her series of psychological crime novels Little Red Riding Hood (Rdeča kapica). The novel became a best-seller and is being made into a TV series. White Wolf is the second novel of the series and a TV adaptation is also forthcoming.