Bone Crossed - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #4)

The fourth book in the Mercy Thompson series, this one picks up right where the third, Iron Kissed, left off--with Mercy going to accept her position as Adam's mate.  Adam puts a stop to any sexual advances right away, which is good, given how IK wrapped up, and says that she needs to work through some of her trauma before they can become physically involved.  Of course she does this over the course of the one week that this book takes place and they're in bed with each other soon enough (not very many steamy scenes, though, unfortunately; nothing that can compare to Kate and Curran's hookup in the Kate Daniels books, that's for sure) but at least it got off on the right foot?

Anyway, the action here focuses around the consequences of Mercy killing a couple of vampires two books back, despite the wishes of the head of the vampire seethe.  When a pair of crossed bones appears on the door of Mercy's garage, indicating that she is persona non grata with the vampires and is able to be attacked by anything that thinks it can take her, it seemed like this book was going to ramp up dramatically.  Especially when her vampire friend shows up mostly-dead (as dead as a vampire can be) in her living room, her mother appears all primed to be a target, and one of her college acquaintances shows up at her door in a strange state hoping that Mercy can help her with a ghost. 

Unfortunately, I feel the promise fell flat.  Much of the book is taken up with politicking with the vampires in the Tri-Cities and a lurking menace of another vampire up north.  Ultimately, it's that vampire who ends up being the crux of the actual action in the book, revealing some new powers for Mercy and causing some drama, but nothing that has to do with real consequences of her actions.  Instead, everything in the Tri-Cities ends up going about in a hunky-dory manner, which was kind of disappointing given how built-up the drama of the vampire killing and its pending consequences were.  It seems like Mercy got let off lightly--which seems like a strange thing to say, given what happened to her in the last book, but that was completely unrelated to what was brewing with the vampires (who were suspiciously absent in the previous book) and it having pretty much an absence of consequences in the end, other than an exchange of "I don't like you"s with Marsilia, meant that this one felt a bit flat.

Was it nice to see Mercy finally acknowledge her feelings for Adam?  Yes, of course.  And I did like how Briggs showed Mercy wanting to move forward, but in many ways being hampered by her recent trauma.  But while Mercy spent three prior books deciding how she felt about Adam and what to do about him, here she just rushes ahead, and it feels like the pace of their relationship went from one extreme to the other within the span of less than week.  Such a swing didn't seem to fit the book or the series.  Mercy obviously needed recovery time and Briggs wanted time to give it to her, but there was no reason that the follow up with the vampires couldn't have been put off for one more book when they could have been given the drama it truly deserved.  Then this one could have focused more on the Blackwood subplot and maybe been used to make Mercy's proper transition into her role as Adam's mate feel more natural.

I'm not giving up on this series--I at least have to read Silver Borne for a challenge--but this one was something of a disappointment, not living up the previous volumes or the drama that was promised for this particular plot.

2 stars out of 5.