Silver Borne - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #5)

Clocking in another book for my 2017 Reading Challenge, I've tackled my third Mercy Thompson novel for the year and the fifth in the series, Silver Borne.  This is a book that was a bestseller the year I graduated high school (2010).  I was actually pretty excited to see this, because books in this vein seem to rarely hit bestseller lists and so seeing it there was very refreshing.

One thing about the Mercy Thompson books is that they seem to pile one right after another.  One book picks up exactly after another one lets off, or at least within a few days of it.  Let me tell you, it must be absolutely exhausting to be Mercy, because she never seems to get a break.  Someone or something is always trying to kill her, and despite her protests that she does nothing to deserve it, she does seem to always be poking her nose in places it probably doesn't belong.  Keeping her head down is not something she excels at.  In this volume we find Mercy, just after the events of Bone Crossed.  Mercy is still settling into her role as Adam's mate in the face of a lot of opposition from the pack, dealing with an increasingly-depressed Samuel, and is also sucked into a missing persons case involving the magical book she's been toting around for several volumes.

I liked this a lot more than Bone Crossed.  BC felt like a lot of politicking and hemming and hawing without much happening.  While this one wasn't full of fight scenes, it still felt like things moved.  Mercy developed in her relationship with Adam and with the pack; there were some pack intrigues, but they didn't take over the book; Samuel started to come into his own and we found out more about his past and his potential future; and the characters overall just seemed more integrated into both the story and the world than wandering around trying to resolve events that really should have been left a few books behind.  All of this was a definite improvement over BC, which was tired in comparison.

This book breathed some fresh air into the series, which I think it really needed.  Fifth books are tricky; by this time, it's either clear that the series should have ended a few volumes ago or that it's good for the long haul.  After Bone Crossed, I wasn't very hopeful, but Silver Borne really brought it back up and gives me hope for a series that doesn't really seem to have an end in sight.

4 stars out of 5.