Blood Bound (Mercy Thompson book 2) by Patricia Briggs (book review).
‘Blood Bound’ is book two in the ‘Mercy Thompson’ series that is currently unfinished and stands at around nine books. The series also includes graphic novels as well as traditional written novels.
We rejoin Mercy Thompson, a walker or shape-shifter whose shape of choice is the coyote. In this book, she is faced with having to take out a vampire demon mash-up. Essentially, she agrees to help her vampire friend, Stefan, to go along with him in her coyote shape to a meeting with another vampire. This meeting turns into a complete bloodbath with only Stefan and Mercy escaping alive, obviously, along with the demon/vampire. Mercy then needs to discover firstly who the vampire/demon is, then how to kill him in order to save the lives of her vampire and werewolf friends.
The one thing I have to say about Patricia Briggs’ books is that they really are fast-paced. She grabs you by the hand and you have to keep running to keep up. You will find yourself keeping on reading just a little bit more until you’ve finished this book in record time.
There are a lot of new elements in this book compared to the first book, ‘Moon Called’. Firstly, I’m fairly certain ghost didn’t feature in the first book, I could be wrong on this. The ghosts play a really big part in this book which I found I enjoyed, finding out how they work in Briggs’ world compared to other writers. Secondly, this book centres a lot more around the vampires with only a little bit about the werewolves. It was definitely interesting seeing how the two different groups function, the comparison between the werewolf pack and the vampire seethe and the way their different hierarchies work. This is something I always find interesting is trying to find out how the same types of characters function very differently in different series of books. For example, in this series, it takes a really long while to make a vampire they have to be primed for a few years prior to the change or it’s unlikely to work. Briggs doesn’t make her creatures into human-like sparkly things, they are not nice creatures who could turn on Mercy at any time. I find that this makes them much more believable, much like you shouldn’t really trust your dog or cat not to do something from their wild genetic history, you really shouldn’t trust these vampires, werewolves or Fae. I can’t wait to find out more about the different creature types within this series as so far they make a lot of sense.
This book was a lot darker than the previous one, possibly because of the vampiric focus. There was one scene in particular amongst the scarier scenes that I really wish I hadn’t read on my own in a dark house. Briggs’ writing can be really horrifying, without being overly bloodbath-like. The characters in her books really are amazingly well drawn, as a reader I didn’t find myself getting confused between them at all they are all very different without being caricatures. She seems to be able to write really believable characters that you really care about, along with scenes that can terrify you. To be fair, I do have a pretty low terror threshold, so I’m guessing most people would be fine with these sections of the book.
I can’t wait to get into the next books in the series, I’m just a little worried that this series might go on too long and become weak as many other great series have.
Sarah Bruch
February 2014
(pub: Orbit. 326 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-84149-684-9)
check out websites: www.orbitbooks.net and www.patriciabriggs.net
