Briggs, Patricia. 2016. Fire Touched: A Mercy Thompson Novel. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0425256763. $27.00 USD.
It’s always a good day to get to spend time in Patricia Briggs’ unique urban fantasy world set in the south-eastern area of Washington state. In the world of Mercy Thompson, a coyote shape-shifter, you will definitely encounter werewolves, fae, vampires and ghosts, along with very creative monsters for Mercy and her friends to overcome. In Fire Touched, the ninth full-length novel in the series, the action starts off fast and furious when a colossal troll released by some angry fae takes over a cable bridge and begins to use automobiles and their human cargo like Matchbox toys. The troll was released to create a distraction while the unfriendly fae try to retrieve a missing and powerful “fire touched” boy who has escaped from the fae reservation.
The pace of this addition to the series is brisk and the interactions among the main characters are as enjoyable as ever. The enchanted Walking Stick makes numerous appearances and plays a major role in the book. However, the actions of the character Thomas Hao in this novel are based on a continuation of a short story from Shifting Shadows, (an anthology) which readers would need to have read to completely understand, and the penultimate scene in Underhill is too similar to one in a previous novel for it to be particularly interesting. I always enjoy the books in this series and was really looking forward to the latest. However, I was a bit disappointed in this one as it did not cover much new ground. And Mercy doesn’t shift into coyote form even once, which really surprised me in a full length novel about….a coyote shifter! All in all, this is still one of my favorite urban fantasy series, and the books have a tremendous following. Holds are high in my library.
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