Eleanor Fourie—Ellie to everybody—is a busy woman. She has an easy-going husband, a daughter who used to have an eating disorder and a father-in-law with dementia. However, we don't meet any of these people until we've spent time with her at work. She founded a small startup called Tranquillity that has grown to a hundred employees and runs the fastest growing mental health app in the world. She works eighty-hour weeks but her hard work is about to pay off, as she will be announced as the new CEO at the next Town Hall. Except she isn't. The board brought in Andreas Nicoll from outside. They want new blood.

It gets worse. There's a MedTech conference coming up at which they're about to demo their new enhancements. Demo Day is two months away and they've just discovered a critical flaw. It seems that customer credit card numbers may be exposed. That's not good for any company, let alone a company with three million active users over twenty countries. And they're running out of money. They need new investors badly, which hinges on a successful Demo Day, which in turn is looking to be in jeopardy. And she starts the book getting hit by a bike. She walked out while texting. She's a little beaten up but goes straight to work anyway rather than the hospital.

No wonder she's outrageously stressed. No wonder her body is going through changes; which Dr. Ncube thinks is likely perimenopause. No wonder she wanders outside in a bathrobe at the call of the moon, escapes four young idiots at the Emirates Stadium, wakes up naked and feeling great. With bloody hands. In Leyton. Something's going on and it's not perimenopause, except as a neat metaphor. It seems pretty likely that she's turning into a werewolf and the blood is from a cat she killed and ate, even though she's an animal lover.

What follows is a lot of things all at once. Most of all, it's that exploration of menopause through a werewolf metaphor. After all, both are about people leaping headlong into dangerous rages on a monthly basis. It's not that much of a stretch. It's also a look at modern corporate life and what it demands from its employees, especially the senior ones. It takes that look through a feminist's eye; had she been male, what are the odds that the board wouldn't have brought in new blood? It also builds an unusual mystery, given that we know whodunit from the outset, but sets the owner of the cat in search of its killer.

I can't say that I liked Ellie because she's not a character to like. Fortunately she's not a character to dislike either and I did have a lot of sympathy for her. None of this is her fault: her gender, her age, her missing out for CEO, the problems the company's having, her turning into a werewolf, all of it. She doesn't even know what she does under the full moon; she just sees the aftermath when she wakes up in the morning, like the world's most alcohol-fuelled night out on the town. But she neglects her family, whom she loves, for her work and that's very noticeable to them.

It's not easy to like Brenda either because she's a cantankerous old biddy, but she's a fascinating character and I appreciated her more and more as the book ran on. She's the owner of Melek, the cat Ellie ate that first night as a werewolf. She's eighty-years-old and feels it, she stands five-feet even and she's quick to anger, but she cares and she has determination. Well, that's just as often sheer bloodymindedness but they're similar. She also suffers from macular degeneration, which means that, while she isn't blind, there's a void in front of her eyes every minute of every day.

Author Sam Beckbessinger allows us to spend plenty of time with both these characters, the story unfolding from both their perspectives in rough alternation. Ellie tries to solve all Tranquillity's problems while subtly sabotaging a pet project of Andreas's that he had her conjure up and then stole the credit. Fortunately it's not a good project and he's an idiot; his previous job was to run a creative consultancy. Brenda does everything she can to track down who killed her cat. She's not a typical hardboiled detective but it's a role she can play, throwing out noir lines like "Some people haven't seen enough of the world to know how little to expect yet."

There are other things going on too, because Beckbessinger is happy to layer on enough subplots to sprawl this out to double the length it could have been. I'm not complaining; I found this strong enough and consistent enough to rattle through it in a night. Sure, I had nothing else to do, given that I'd just gone through surgery and had to stay at the hospital overnight to make sure it took, but it was never a hardship. I cycled through sleeping, reading, sleeping, reading until it was done and a convenient breakfast tray arrived.

As entertaining as it was to read, from an easy plea for sympathy to the boss battle we all needed right now, it also proved educational. It's not overtly feminist for a while, even though there are a barrage of undercurrents to hint that it's coming, beginning with Ellie being overlooked for CEO. However, feminist moments grow more frequent as the book runs on and they include some very shocking pieces of data. Well, they're shocking to an old guy like me, but probably aren't to women. And I'm not just talking about lines of dialogue like "Most women aren't nearly as angry as they should be, in my experience." I'm down with that.

I'm talking about the fact that the National Institute of Health didn't require that research trials include women until 1993. That's ridiculous. I'm talking about Ellie having the every square foot of high ground at a board meeting, only to lose all authority the moment a tear forms on her cheek. Now she's being emotional and should be discounted. That's not at all fair. And I'm talking about how the medical community knows more about erectile dysfunction (which only affects about 20% of men) than it does about menopause (which affects every woman who lives long enough). That's outrageous.

I liked this book rather a lot, even though I've only gone through menopause by proxy. I was here when it turned my better half into a werewolf. Well, actually it didn't hit her too severely, but it's fair to say that it did hit her. Clearly I'm a lucky man. I liked it even though I found myself largely on the other side, sympathetic to Ellie but backing Brenda. I won't quite suggest that I want to be Brenda when I grow up but there's an element of truth to that. She's up against it from moment one but perseveres anyway, even if a good part of that is that "it just so happens that I'm retired, I can't bloody drive anywhere and 'Coronation Street' isn't on until eight."

She lives her own life her own way and when that's affected by an outside force, she relentlessly hunts it down, even faced with painful rejection after painful rejection. Only Pencil, a young cop earning his stripes, goes above and beyond for her and even he has limits. Much of this she has to do on her own and she's even punished for that. At one point she's recovering in the hospital from a werewolf attack and gets out to discover that her landlord has evicted her. And yet she continues, all the way until that glorious boss battle.

This should be mandatory reading for any woman about to go through menopause and any male partners of any description who live with them. ~~ Hal C F Astell