Jess Nevins wrote a lengthy review for the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Murder at Full Moon is narrated from the point of view of Egg Waters, a college student suspended from his school after a night of drunken tomfoolery who is then forced to work a job for a year’s time in order to gain readmission. Waters finds his job in the fictional locale of Cone City, a dismal, waterlogged, fog-and-wind-beset town somewhere in central California. He becomes the reporter for the town’s newspaper and in that role is present as mysterious crimes begin to take place. The local bon vivant, Luis Caré, has been receiving harassing notes, and somebody has been burning “PAY” into the walls of his house. Then, during a full moon, this same person kills one of the dogs at the hunting club to which Caré belongs, where Waters is a guest. The harasser then kills all but one of the hunting club’s dogs — as well as the club’s Swedish chef, burning more threatening words into the walls.
The brutish town sheriff fails to make any headway solving the mystery, so Waters turns to the sheriff’s rival, Maximilian Sergius Hoogle, a wealthy eccentric