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Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson book 5) by Patricia Briggs (book review).

‘Silver Borne’ is book five in the ‘Mercy Thompson’ series by Patricia Briggs. Currently there are about nine books in the series and it doesn’t show signs of stopping any time soon. Normally, this would make my heart sink but, in this case, I really hope this series carries on forever, they just seem to get better and better.

SilverBorne

Just to give a quick round-up of the series so far (there will probably be spoilers), Mercy Thompson is a shape-shifter. This means she can change into a coyote in seconds whenever she feels the need. She happens to live next door to Adam, the alpha of the local werewolf pack, while also living with another dominant male werewolf Samuel who she grew up with. Luckily, they all seem to get on, so much so that Mercy and Adam have now become bonded as mates. Mercy always seems to manage to get herself into trouble and, in this instance, it is not entirely of her own making. She happens to have borrowed a particularly important book during the last adventure she had from one of her Fae friends. This makes her a target for the Fae, who are my favourite set of characters within this urban fantasy world. The Fae are not too kind to people they think have something they want and they set various different people to kill Mercy and anyone else who gets in their way. These are not the pleasant glittery Fae, these ones mean business and, the more innocent they look, the faster Mercy needs to run in the opposite direction!

Although Mercy’s trouble with the Fae is the real plot, I found that the parts of this book that I really enjoyed were those to do with the relationships within the pack. Essentially, when an alpha werewolf bonds with a mate, they can then communicate through thoughts and emotions transmitted through the pack bond. Also, other members of the pack can use this bond to communicate with each other and the alpha. Unfortunately, as Mercy is not a werewolf, this bond seems to have become a little confused with only certain messages coming through and sometimes accidentally messages that are meant to remain private.

Along with this new way of communicating, there is further development of some of the mental health issues of the characters. Mercy is still trying to deal with her rape so has issues with trust and physical relationships. Samuel, on the other hand, has problems with what he is meant to be doing with his life as he’s a dominant werewolf who has no interest in having a pack of his own, he is also really old as werewolves go. This can cause some mental instability and this shows itself as having his wolf side become dominant, incidentally this can prove fatal to werewolves and those around them. It was interesting watching how he dealt with this and I loved learning that much more about how the two halves of the werewolf interact differently in different wolves.

I also really enjoyed learning about the new characters in this book that I really hope will become more regular characters. For example, Ari who has some interesting links to some of the werewolves. I think this could be a great way to learn more about Samuel’s past and why he is the way he is, plus it could even involve some kind of love interest for the future.

Overall, I loved this book with its dual personalities of deep relationships and mental health issues, along with the action and also the humour used between the characters. I only want to read more books from this series!

Sarah Bruch

December 2014

Follow me @shelbycat

(pub: Orbit. 308 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-84149-799-0)

check out websites: www.orbitbooks.net and www.patriciabriggs.com

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