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Night Broken (Mercy Thompson) by Patricia Briggs (view source)
Revision as of 08:00, 14 March 2014
, 08:00, 14 March 2014no edit summary
|summary=The latest adventure for Mercy the mechanic and the werewolf family she married into. The balance of domestic detail and sheer fantasy threat shows this to be one of the more successful urban fantasy volumes available.
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Phew. That's the sound of relief I gave when I found this book, the eighth in this lengthy genre series, was on form. As the quality had hardly ever dipped in the past you might be wondering why I sounded particularly anxious this time. Well, book seven was that dip, and this time round things have changed – for the first time the British market gets a hardback. But we've not jumped the shark. If anything, the fantasy side of this series is following on from [[Mercy Thompson: River Marked by Patricia Briggs|book six – River Marked]] and the fae implement that was so much a feature of that book is being requested by a dangerously powerful character. But the urban fantasy side of this series is not without its dangerous characters – as Mercy is forced to bring the worried, frantic yet exceedingly manipulative figure of her husband's first wife into the shelter of their household…
Again, that might sound like cause for alarm, but is easily assuaged. There is no problem in the hands of this author for the personal politics and family warfare of Mercy's household being to the fore. She, if it needs saying, is a shapeshifter with growing powers of magic and kinship with her coyote form; her husband Adam is the prime werewolf in the area, and the status, bearing and power of everyone in the household is constantly on a knife-edge. And neither is that anything like the real story – not only is there the issue for Mercy of the fae wanting his walking stick back, there is the very real and very dangerous reason for Adam's ex seeking shelter with them.