Frost Burned

Almost like two shorter books jammed together, but in a good way. ( )

4 1/2 stars...

Doesn't matter what Mercy does or whom she has at her back to keep her out of trouble....she ends up in the middle of it.

This time Mercy and Jesse are out at the Black Friday sales when Adam and the pack are kidnapped. And when I say the pack I mean the whole pack.

It seems that someone has hired rogue military agents for Cantrip, an anti-everything group, who kidnap and drug the pack. The goal is to get Adam to kill some senator or else they start killing the pack.

Or so that is what we are lead to believe is the plot here. With a lot of twists and sudden turns the mercenaries turn against the guys who hired them. One of them gives Adam unofficial information about what is going on and who they know are the key players in the plot.

Mercy in the meantime has hidden Jesse and Gabriel until they can figure out just what the heck is going on. The mate/pack bond is hinkey seeing that the wolves have been tranquilized with that combination that Gerry Wallace developed a few books back. They are more in danger from the silver than the men shooting them.

We get to meet another Alpha wolf....Aisil otherwise known as The Moor. Guess he's one crazy and vicious son of a gun. He's been sent by Bran since there is a lot going on and no one knows just whom they can trust.

One liners are great. Mercy once again finds herself the center of the wrong kind of attention. Marisila is looking for Mercy, not to kill her this time but because she needs her ghost seeing skill. Stefan is on the scene along with a mystery Vamp from San Francisco. Hmmm...something is a foot in the neighborhood.

Seems that the wolves were just a diversion for Gauntlet Boy, a vamp we met when Stefan left the seethe, who is trying to get rid of Marisila and take over the world. His big plan is to bring the vamps out into the open, evilness and all, and eventually take over the world. Right, like they are going to let that happen.

Interesting twists and turns. Battle wasn't as epic as it could have been but still we learned a few interesting things. Oh and we get insight is to just how strong the bond between Mercy/Adam and the pack is. Who knew you could do that....trust me, it's impressive.

Off to the next one to see what's in store for our girl and her wolf. ( )

Somehow my review and rating is gone, so my review won't be as detailed as before.

I do remember liking this book, hence my 5 star rating. It was quite a roller coaster and showed the strong bond between Adam and Mercy. I would say it's probably the best book in the series so far.

I would recommend this book series to anybody, with telling to start reading at book 1, since it shows the buildup of Mercy and how we got to this point. I would tell them to read the other series in this world, Alpha and Omega, since this book includes some stuff that happened in their book series. ( )

http://teensniper.tumblr.com/post/51336819175/150-books-in-2013-43 ( )

It was mid-February. The sky was pregnant with grey snow that turned to rain when I dropped 200 metres down the hill to the lakeside. The noon-time temperature was just above freezing. I had proposals to write in my deliberately small and dark office.

So, before I started my day, I decided to spend some time with Mercy Thompson and remind myself how much fun reading can be.

I opened up "Frost Burned" and found that it was Thanksgiving in Washington State, so the weather was no better than here but within a single chapter, I'd been transported from here to somewhere where all I have to do is relax and admire how skillfully Patricia Briggs re-immerses me into Mercy's world through the mundane activity of Black Friday shopping and then blows everything apart, leaving me keen to know what happens next.

Better yet, I'd been able to get "Frost Burned" in the audiobook version (books 2-6 aren't available as audiobooks in Switzerland) so I let Lorelei King lay the whole thing out for me as I walk beneath slowly brightening sky to get a café creme and a couple of croissants for breakfast.

I consumed the rest of the book over the next two days with a growing sense of contentment because the writing was good, the plot was engaging and Mercy keeps getting more and more real.

I'd wondered how Patrica Briggs would keep Mercy at the centre of things now that she's married to Adam Hauptman, the Pack Alpha and is surrounded by protective and scary werewolves. The solution was simple and brilliant: have the Pack abducted and leave Mercy to protect Adam's daughter and try to rescue the Pack.

I liked the fact that Mercy has to solve this problem by collaborating with others and by being willing to make sacrifices on a human and believable scale. The book also neatly folded in characters and themes from the earlier books. The big bad doesn't emerge out of nowhere. In retrospect, I should have been able to see something like this coming. Of course, the fact that I didn't is part of the fun.

The only criticism I have of the book is that there was a hiatus in the middle as one problem was solved only to reveal a much bigger problem underneath. I can see why the pause was there but it felt a little flat all the same and left me feeling that I had two stories stitched together.

Still, both parts of the story were good. The baddies were credible. The outcome was dramatic but feasible and Mercy has established herself as a force to be reckoned with.

I've been rationing myself to one Mercy Thompson book a month but it's March now and there's still snow outside so I'm looking forward to opening up "Night Broken" and letting Patricia Briggs and Lorelei King light up my imagination again.

Listen to the SoundCloud link below to sample Lorelei King's performance.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/82071871" params="color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /] ( )