52 pages • 1 hour read
James Patterson, Mike LupicaThe House of Wolves
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 90-112Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 90 Summary
Jack storms into Danny’s house, demanding to know why Danny is siding with Jenny. Danny says that he’s tired of being told what to do. He recalls a night when Jack, still a teenager, almost beat Joe to death. In response, Jack beats up Danny.
Chapter 91 Summary
Jenny meets with Megan Callahan to ask her not to publish recently released pictures of her and Detective Cantor kissing, but Callahan refuses. The pictures appear on TMZ and Wolf.com. Callahan reveals that NFL Commissioner Abrams hired the photographer.
Chapter 92 Summary
Cantor is relieved not to be taken off the Wolf cases after the pictures came out, but he is disappointed by Jenny’s standoffish attitude. Jenny confronts her brother Jack about being on her father’s boat the night he died; she admits that she, too, was on the boat earlier that night.
Chapter 93 Summary
Jack accuses Jenny of spying on him for Cantor. Jenny assures him that Cantor has no idea that either of them were on the boat. She explains that she was there to comfort her dad because earlier, he’d drunkenly told her that he loved her, and she hadn’t responded. As she was leaving in her car, she saw Jack running up the dock. Jack claims he went to the boat to try to save Joe.
Chapter 94 Summary
Jack explains that Joe was in negotiations with Gallo and that Gallo threatened to kill Joe if their deal didn’t go through. Later that day, Jenny meets with Gallo and rejects his offer to buy the Wolves for $4 million. Gallo then threatens Jenny with a fatal accident like her father and brother experienced.
Chapter 95 Summary
Gallo visits Michael Barr, the wealthy casino magnate and arms dealer who has been secretly funding Gallo’s ploy to buy the Wolves. Barr hopes the team and a new stadium would increase his political reach in the city. He orders Gallo to get rid of Jenny.
Chapter 96 Summary
At Gallo’s cliffside home, he discusses plans to take out Jenny with his henchman Erik Mason. Gallo reminisces about how easy he thought the takeover would be before meeting Jenny. Suddenly, Mason lifts Gallo up and tosses him over the cliffs.
Chapter 97 Summary
Cantor questions Jenny about Gallo’s death, but she denies knowing anything. She continues to be cold to Cantor, upsetting him. At her first Hunters Point High practice in weeks, her football players fire her from her position as coach.
Chapter 98 Summary
The Hunters Point High players explain that Jenny is never around and that they feel she has chosen the professional team over them. Jenny realizes that she feels safer with her high school team than the professional team, and she asks them to reconsider.
Chapter 99 Summary
The Hunters Point High team wins their championship, which they play at Wolves Stadium. At home, Jenny finds Mason waiting to take her to meet with Michael Barr. She refuses to go, but Mason tells her she must. Jenny then tells him her mysterious uncle’s name, and Mason is very surprised and leaves at once.
Chapter 100 Summary
Cantor remains convinced that the deaths of Joe Wolf and John Gallo are connected. He confronts Erik Mason about his role in Gallo’s death. When Mason denies killing Gallo, Cantor says that Mason hardly protected him, either.
Chapter 101 Summary
Jenny prepares for the Wolves’ final regular season game, which is a grudge match against the Patriots, Ted’s new team. Losing the game ends the season for either team. Suddenly, Money McGee appears at Jenny’s door, visibly intoxicated.
Chapter 102 Summary
McGee spends the night at Jenny’s house and the next morning, the team’s doctors prepare him for the game. Coach Morrissey assures Jenny that McGee will play, regardless of how he feels. Despite this, the first half of the game is a disaster.
Chapter 103 Summary
The Wolves are losing 21-10 at halftime, but they manage to come back within scoring distance in the final minutes of the game. McGee runs the ball for a touchdown, but he is brutally hit. He briefly waves to the crowd before being carted off the field.
Chapter 104 Summary
After the Wolves’ victory, Jenny drives to Detective Cantor’s house without thinking. She apologizes for being tough with him, explaining that she felt defensive. He admits to pursuing her romantically, and they kiss.
Chapter 105 Summary
The next morning, Jenny grabs the paper from Cantor’s front step dressed only in a sweatshirt. She is surprised to find reporters and her brother Jack waiting outside. Jenny confronts Jack and threatens to hit him with the newspaper, feeling pleased when he flinches.
Chapter 106 Summary
Six weeks later, Jenny is summoned to another meeting with the oldest, most powerful NFL team owners at the Super Bowl. She prepares to defend herself and the photos with Cantor, but she is shocked when Patriots owner AJ Frost fires NFL Commissioner Abrams.
Chapter 107 Summary
On the phone, Jenny explains to Cantor that the NFL owners somehow learned that Abrams was working with Barr and Gallo, and they pressured him to step down. Cantor reveals that he, too, has been fired and taken off the Wolf cases.
Chapter 108 Summary
Cantor receives a call from Erik Mason, whom he had been following as a detective. Mason insists that he didn’t kill anyone and asks Cantor to meet him later that night. He warns Cantor not to wear a wire; Cantor decides to bring a gun.
Chapter 109 Summary
Cantor is now confident that Mason is the killer: He has a violent history as a police officer and had worked for Wolf and Gallo. When Mason arrives, Cantor exits his car to meet him. Mason shoots Cantor twice in the chest.
Chapter 110 Summary
Cantor is wearing bullet-proof vest and survives the shooting. He takes his own gun from the car and shoots Mason twice in the chest, too. When he realizes that Mason is still alive, he refuses to call an ambulance unless Mason talks.
Chapter 111 Summary
Mason admits to killing Joe Wolf, and Cantor later calls Jenny to give her this news. That same day, Jenny travels to Florida to visit Nick Amato, the mysterious uncle whose influence helped persuade the NFL owners to accept her and whose very name scared off Mason. On reaching Nick’s house, Jenny discovers to her surprise that he is too old and frail to conduct business. His son, Vincent, admits that he has been the one speaking to her and helping her out; he now runs his father’s business.
Chapter 112 Summary
Vincent reveals that his father had leverage on the NFL owners and that his family owns half of the Wolves, having financed Joe’s purchase of the team. Jenny thanks Vincent for his help but tells him the team is hers, not theirs. She repeats the advice that her father always gave her: “Kill or be killed” (394).
Chapters 90-112 Analysis
At the beginning of this final section of The House of Wolves, several plotlines are unresolved. Some of these plotlines—such as the mystery of Joe’s murder and the mysterious force behind Gallo—are resolved. However, many of the mysteries raised in the book are not fully resolved. For example, Mason admits that it was him “who’d been a strong enough swimmer to make it back to shore the night he threw [Joe Wolf] overboard” (387); however, it remains unclear who paid him to do so. Similarly, it is revealed that Gallo is acting under the orders of Michael Barr, an arms dealer who sees owning the Wolves as his chance to “control a city in a way that no private citizen ever has” (337). At the end of the novel, however, it is unclear whether Gallo will be persecuted by detectives, who have concrete proof of his attempts to corrupt NFL officials. Finally, while Jenny seems to trust that Danny has returned to the Wolves in good faith, the novel provides no answer to Cantor’s question about whether Danny “had just been giving Jenny a head fake by coming back to the team and had been working against her all along” (382). These partially resolved plotlines reflect the continuing uncertainty in Jenny’s life: Although she knows the truth about her father’s death, she cannot be fully sure whether she is truly safe.
In addition to these partially resolved mysteries, some of the plotlines raised earlier in The House of Wolves remain fully unresolved at the end of novel. Thomas’s murder is still unsolved, although it is implied that Erik Mason killed him, too. Further, the secret romantic relationships between Gallo and Elise Wolf and between Jack and his former stepmother Rachel are also never mentioned or clarified. Finally, Bobby Erlich’s attempts to join Gallo’s business ventures are never brought up again, either, and it remains unclear whether he had any part in the leaked photos of Jenny and Cantor. These unresolved mysteries ensure that the Wolf family narrative remains open, allowing Patterson and Lupica to write sequels.
The final section of the novel also introduces two important new characters. Jenny’s mysterious uncle—whom she reached out to twice in the novel—is revealed to be her father’s best friend, Nick Amato. Before Joe’s death, Nick promised Jenny that “if [she] ever needed anything, and that meant anything at all, [she] just had to pick up the phone” (387). Jenny tells Nick that he was “a better father” to her than Joe had ever been (390). The revelation that Jenny has been protected throughout the novel by a father figure is ironic, given the fact that she spends the novel fighting against her father.
Similarly, Nick’s son Vincent, who is secretly running his ailing father’s business, is introduced as a substitute brother figure for Jenny. At the end of the novel, Jenny tells Vincent that she will not give him control over the Wolves and warns him to “Kill or be killed” (394), suggesting that Vincent is stepping into the role of villain. In the same way that Nick acts as a father figure, replacing Joe, Vincent acts as an antagonistic brother, replacing Danny and Jack, whom Jenny has finally defeated. These new relationships in Jenny’s life also open this novel up to possible sequels.
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