Excerpt from The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

These, you'll say, were not the calculations of a being worn out by history, too full of content, emptily replete. Granted. But it's one thing to know death's twenty-seven days away, quite another to know it might be making your acquaintance any second now. To be murdered here, in human shape, would be gross, precipitate and - despite there being no such thing as justice - unjust. Besides, the person tracking me couldn't be Grainer. As Harley said, his lordship prized the wulf not the wer, and the thought of being despatched by anyone less than the Hunt's finest was repugnant. And this was to say nothing of my one diarist's duty still undischarged: If I was snuffed out here and now who would tell the untellable tale? The whole disease of your life written but for that last lesion of the heart, its malignancy and muse. God's gone, Meaning too, and yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame.

All of which, my cynic said, as I stopped under a street lamp to light another Camel, was decent enough, unless it was just a fancy rationalisation for the sudden and desperate desire not to die.

At which point a silenced bullet hit the street lamp's concrete three inches above my head.

Excerpted from The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan. Copyright © 2011 by Glen Duncan. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.