Frost Burned by Patricia Briggs

Frost Burned by Patricia Briggs is the seventh book in the Mercy Thompson series which is in a shared universe with her Alpha and Omega series (three novels and a novella). I originally got interested in this series because I came across a graphic novelization of Moon Called, the first book in the series. The art was pretty rough, but the opening scenes of the story has the main character rescuing a teenager from a couple of werewolf thugs, one of which she kills. I felt this was much like early Laurell K. Hamilton whose stuff had been the only Urban Fantasy I'd read that I really liked, so I devoured the whole series in a week or so.

Like many series in the Urban Fantasy genre, these just keep coming, even when the concept is played out. I had actually put Mercy in this category after the sixth book River Marked, but a major event in the universe that occurred in the most recent Alpha and Omega book Fair Game breathed a bit more interest into the world.

Mercy Thompson is a coyote skinwalker in a relatively typical Urban Fantasy world with werewolves, vampires, faeries etc., living alongside modern humanity. In this world the fae have been exposed to the world for some time and have an arrangement with the US government where they live on reservations. The werewolves have only recently been revealed to the general public and people still think that vampires are a myth. It's the werewolves that get the focus in both of her series. Mercy was raised by a werewolf pack (actually the werewolf pack, headed by the leader of all the werewolves in the US) and has a close relationship with a different werewolf pack and particularly with its Alpha.

That's pretty much it for a backgrounder of the series. Obviously, by book seven, things have moved on significantly. In fact, the series could have ended with a few loose ends by the end of the fifth book. The sixth covered Mercy's honeymoon, and while it did wrap up those loose ends, it moved the main characters away from the rich setting and supporting characters developed in the first five books and I felt it suffered for it.

The event that happened at the end of Fair Game shifted the politics of Mercy's world significantly and Frost Burned begins with what looks to be the US government moving to efficiently take out the werewolves in one coordinated strike. That's an interesting premise, and it may yet be taken up in the Alpha and Omega books, but there's more than the obvious at work here. I won't spoil it, but it's a nice return to the world and it's quite enjoyable. I do think the narrative focus for this world has shifted to the other series though.

Currently Reading: Every Day by David Levithan

In Other News: Today's probably the first day I've been able to stand to look at a computer screen for longer than 10-15 minutes so I should be back to posting a bit more regularly.