Patricia Briggs

I am converted: I am a fan of Patricia Briggs.

I finished Bone Crossed, book four in the Mercy Thompson series, with a sense that this might be where she stops for a while — lots of loose ends were gathered up, if not tied off.  And while that’s satisfying on one hand (I dislike series that never end), I really enjoy these characters and the world they inhabit, and would very much like to see more of them.  Mercy is a good, solid, conflicted heroine, doing what she has to, sacrificing herself at every turn while still stubbornly holding onto life and herself as she does so.  She’s been beaten to a pulp physically and emotionally, and she keeps on fighting back, just trying to live her life, fix cars, and occasionally be a coyote.  I really like this series.

When I finished Bone Crossed, I picked up Raven’s Shadow, another Briggs book, this time pure fantasy rather than urban fantasy.  I was immediately hooked by the slightly unexpected plot structure:  40 pages of backstory, then a 20 year time jump, and a change of point of view.  And the way that she revealed history and built the world, purely through characters telling other characters stories and sharing information was incrediby engaging, building a world around the reader in a plausible and enticingly gap-filled way.  The reader is never quite sure about what’s going on, because all history and knowledge are being constructed by the characters from their own incomplete awareness.  And it works, and the book was fantastic, and I want to read the next one.

Add in how much I enjoyed Cry Wolf, and the fact that my only caveat about it was that I didn’t understand enough of the pack structure — a criticism neatly explained by the very compliment I gave above about how she delivers information through character perspective — and I think I’m a fan of Briggs.  The way she builds worlds and doles out information really works in the context of the adventure stories she writes, and the sense that the reader is learning along with the characters leaves us curious, invested in, and engaged by the people she writes about.

I do love finding new authors to follow, particularly when they have backlists I can dig through!