Mercy Thompson fans who have been eagerly anticipating this book will love the complicated twists of the plot, and romance readers will absolutely adore Adam.
I may have mentioned (a few hundred times) that Patricia Briggs is one of my most recent author finds. Yes, I’m late to the Mercy Thompson party, but believe me, I’ve made up for lost time! At book seven—not counting the Alpha and Omega spin-off books—this series is just as exciting and perhaps even more romantic as when it all began.
The story starts off deceptively gently, with Mercy having some bonding time with her new stepdaughter, Jesse. When they’re involved in a car accident, Mercy is puzzled and then increasingly alarmed when she can’t get in touch with Adam or anyone else in the pack.
It turns out that Adam and most of the pack have been ambushed. Ben, who managed to escape, tells Mercy what happened, and Mercy has no choice but to tap every resource and contact she can draw on for help. This includes using Marsilia’s shiny new Mercedes AMG to transport a bleeding werewolf—and that’s just for starters.
Readers who love Mercy’s narrative voice won’t be disappointed with Frost Burned. The first part of the story is dominated by Mercy trying to work out what’s going on around her and making the best of a bad situation. Her choices between bad and worse provide fodder for snark as well as tension.
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The pacing and plotting are not as balanced as in the first book. Mostly we’re just along for the ride—but it’s still a fabulous trip.
Blood Bound is the second book of Patricia Briggs’s hugely popular urban fantasy series featuring Mercy Thompson, a coyote shapeshifter nominally mated to a werewolf and formerly employed by a fae mechanic. (As I mentioned in my review of Moon Called, this series is book crack.) After Mercy’s adventures in the first book, she’s asked to return a favour by accompanying her vampire buddy, Stefan, on a mysterious errand that ends in gruesome violence when they discover a demon-possessed sorcerer turned vampire on a killing rampage.
This new vampire is deadly, and Mercy reluctantly agrees to leave the hunting to stronger creatures. After one of the werewolves turns up barely alive, Adam, the pack alpha, and Samuel, Mercy’s werewolf housemate, go hunting themselves. Unfortunately, werewolves turn out to be highly susceptible to demon magic, which causes them to lose control. When Mercy gets a late-night visit from the demon vampire, she realises that her friends are in the vampire’s hands and she has until sunset to save them.
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Despite the weak romance and a family conflict that remains unresolved, there are enough interesting characters and situations to make this book an engaging, if not altogether satisfying, read.
This review is part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge. Click here for a list of books I’ve read so far.
Wendy Hopkins arrives at the Pilbara in search of her biological father and some self-redemption after a bad decision in her previous job resulted in disastrous consequences. But being the safety manager at an iron ore wharf comes with a load of politics, an overdose of testosterone and, with cyclone season approaching, more danger than she bargains for.*
When a stranger, who ‘brought the same visual pop to her eyeballs that Brad Pitt brought to the big screen’, follows her while jogging, she punches him in the jaw. In return, he steals a kiss. The stranger turns out to be Gavin Jones, piling engineer and infamous womaniser, and it also turns out that he may have the information Wendy is looking for.
It must be a sign of how starved I am for Australian-set romances featuring authentic sounding Australian characters that I found it difficult to put this book down, despite the lacklustre character arcs and romance plot. I might have skimmed through some of the descriptions of working procedures at the wharf, but I was always drawn back by the dialogue. Where else, for example, would you find a simile like this: ’…when he came in here last week he was looking at you like you were a bowl of hot wedges served with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce.’
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This series is fine-grade book crack, and I’m inhaling these books as fast as I possibly can.
I don’t know why it took me so long to pick up a Patricia Briggs novel, but I just spent seven straight days reading her Alpha and Omega series and then her Mercy Thompson series. When I was done, I started rereading the books in chronological order.
I blame Sarah Wendell and all the enablers on Twitter.
Mercy Thompson is a walker—a coyote shifter and the only one of her kind that she knows of. She has abandonment issues—her mother sent her to be fostered with the werewolves, her foster dad committed suicide, and she was sent away at sixteen when the pack’s Alpha caught her necking with his son—which has led her to value two things: her independence and her ability to keep a low profile and not get into any more trouble.
So when hiring a desperate werewolf to work at her garage—’I have a degree in history, which is one of the reasons I’m an auto mechanic.’—leads to Mercy accidentally killing another moonstruck werewolf, she contacts the local pack’s Alpha for help. Adam Hauptman is the Alpha of the Columbia Basin pack and Mercy’s next door neighbour. They have an…interesting relationship in which Mercy, in response to Adam’s attempts to assert any authority over her, ‘spoke respectfully to his face—usually—and pulled the dilapidated old Rabbit [she] kept for parts out into [her] back field where it was clearly visible from Adam’s bedroom window.’
This isn’t a romance, by the way, but there is a burgeoning romantic arc for Mercy. More on that soon.
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Keeper. New auto-buy author. Need I say more?
This review is part of the AWW2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge. Click here for a list of books I’ve read so far.
Most of the books I read nowadays are romance, so it’s not often that I find a one that makes me feel like I’m reading something new in the genre. Until a book like Grease Monkey Jive reminds me that, yes, this genre is more than capable of surprising me in all the right ways.
Grease Monkey Jive opens with ballroom dancing instructor and performer Alex Gibson having a bit of a moment with dance partner Dan Maddox, and as I read the first chapter, I settled down for a lovely, comfortable read. Little did I know.
It turns out that this is only a teaser, and the story flashes back to introduce the characters and the plot. We see Dan and his mates—Mitch, Fluke and Ant—going through a typical Friday night, drinking at a club and picking up chicks. Dan is the babe magnet who leaves with the most beautiful woman but is hard-pressed to remember her name the morning after. It’s an aimless existence, and he begins to question if there’s more to life than picking up random girls, surfing with his best mates and working at McMurty’s garage—particularly when he finds himself in strife after making out with Fluke’s younger sister.
Meanwhile, Alex decides to enter the Australasian Dance Theatre Championship, despite feeling resistance from her mother and her boyfriend, in part because she loves to dance but also because she could really do with the prize money. Due to what she perceives to be her mother’s issues relating to having been a single mum, Alex feels pressure to put away her dancing shoes to pursue a career in business and settle down with her stable and financially secure boyfriend.
It takes a while for Alex and Dan’s stories to converge and come back to where it began in the book, but it’s a fabulous journey—more so Dan’s than Alex’s, to be honest. Although the supporting characters around Alex sometimes surprised me, Alex herself rarely did; her issues are familiar in the world of romance. In contrast, Australian author Ainslie Paton displays an affinity for Dan’s voice and Dan’s world that had me completely wrapped up in his story.
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Innocent In The Ivory Tower by Lucy Ellis
When this book gets good, it’s, oh, so very good. Alexei and Maisy may reflect the traditional alpha male and ingénue pairing in category romance, but they don’t always behave as expected. And that’s a good thing.
This review is part of the AWW2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge. Click here for a list of books I’ve read so far.
This book is the reason I try to read past a bad beginning to get to the meat of a story. Maisy Edmonds has been left caring for her best friend’s baby, Kostya, when she and her husband die in an accident. When the house suddenly explodes with strange men, it’s all she can do to convince Alexei Ranaevsky that Kostya needs her.
Alexei is Kostya’s godfather and he takes his role seriously. So much so that without any warning whatsoever, he storms the house where the baby is living, agrees to bring Maisy with him to provide some constancy in the baby’s life…and proceeds to pash her when he accidentally but conveniently walks in while she’s clad in nothing but a towel.
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In keeping with Halloween, this month’s Mixed Bag is a mix of (mostly) otherworldly books by (mostly) Australian authors.
Fallen by Lauren Kate (Fallen #1)
Fallen by Lauren Kate (Fallen, Book 1)
When Luce starts senior year (year 12 for us) at a boarding school for troubled teens, she discovers that her classmates aren’t, well, normal, and that the reason the school hottie is avoiding her at all costs has something to do with her destiny—until for some reason her destiny doesn’t happen on schedule.
I might have enjoyed this story more if I hadn’t already read the many—oh, so many—teen urban fantasy books with similar characters and conflicts. The brooding, I’m-no-good-for-you-so-I’ll-turn-down-your-advances-by-being-rude-and-offensive hero just doesn’t work for me anymore. At least, not unless the heroine calls him out on it—and Luce doesn’t do it enough. It got interesting towards the end, but the main characters didn’t have enough shades of grey for me.
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