Saturday 19 March 2011

CBR3 Book 19: "River Marked" by Patricia Briggs

Publisher: Orbit
Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 3 stars
Date begun: March 15th, 2011
Date finished: March 18th, 2011

River Marked is the sixth book in the series about Mercy Thompson. There is no way I can avoid writing this review without spoilers for some of the previous books in the series (and a bit of a spoiler for the beginning of this one too), and so if you haven't read the books, skip the review and go start with the first one, Moon Called. They're all varying degrees of excellent, I promise. 

The last Mercy Thompson book I reviewed on this blog was Silver Borne and in it, I complained that Mercy and Adam got to spend very little time together, and that it was annoying me. It's like Patricia Briggs heard my moaning and decided to give me exactly what I wanted in this book, because Mercy and Adam spend the whole book together. Having mate bonded and got engaged, they

***SPOILER**** 
finally get married and go on their honeymoon in this book. 
 **** END SPOILER ***                              

You'd think Mercy would be able to stay out of mortal danger on a camping trip with her man, but no, on one of their first nights away, they find an boat with a traumatized guy and while trying to save him, there are creepy tentacles trying to pull Mercy under water. Soon she's having horrible nightmares of people drowning in the river, and it's obvious that there's a very sinister explanation to all the people who have gone missing in the area in the last few months. As werewolves don't do well around water (their bodies are extremely dense and they sink), there's little Adam can do to help Mercy sort out this trouble.

Some of the reviews I saw of this book complained that they missed the many supporting characters of the Mercy books in this one, as it pretty much focuses completely on Mercy and Adam, but I thought it worked fine, and with the intriguing additional information it reveals about Mercy's father, it was a nice addition to the series. It's not like the other characters aren't in the book in the beginning and at the end of the book, and I really did like to see the relationship between Mercy and Adam develop and solidify. Even though he's an alpha werewolf and very possessive and protective, Adam's not afraid to let Mercy take care of herself and he understands that in certain situations he can't really rush in and take over everything. They're a lovely couple, and I'm very happy that they got a book to themselves. I'm sure the rest of the pack, and Stephan and Jesse and Gabriel and everyone will get more to do in the next one. 

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