Review: River Marked by Patricia Briggs

Book: River Marked by Patricia Briggs
Series: Mercecdes Thompson #6
Pages:  326

Genre: Urban Fantasy
Buy A Copy: Amazon | Book Depository
Available Formats: Hardcover / Ebook / Audiobook 
Publication Date: March 1st, 2011
How Did I Get This Book: Purchased
First Sentence: "Under the glare of streetlights, I could see that the grass of Stefan's front lawn was dried to yellow by the high summer heat."
Preview Book: Preview with Google Books
Description: Car mechanic Mercy Thompson has always known there was something different about her, and not just the way she can make a VW engine sit up and beg. Mercy is a shapeshifter, a talent she inherited from her long-gone father. She's never known any others of her kind. Until now. An evil is stirring in the depths of the Columbia River-one that her father's people may know something about. And to have any hope of surviving, Mercy and her mate, the Alpha werewolf Adam, will need their help...

I am a huge Mercy Thompson fan and I truly wanted to love River Marked. The idea of a book that includes Mercy and Adam getting hitched sounded great. Unfortunately, their nuptials came at the cost of all of my other favorite characters. The majority of the tried and true cast is absent from the sixth Mercy installment. Stefan, Warren and Samuel make extremely brief cameos, but all three are missing for most of the book.

For me, the magic of the Mercy stories has always been in the characters. Sure the action is fun, but the characters are what make these books great. I honestly love every single one of them - which hardly ever happens in books. Don't get me wrong, I am all for adding new characters into the mix (which is what Briggs tries to do here), but not at the expense of my old favorites. Maybe it's just me, but a book without an adequate dose of Samuel, Stefan, Warren, Kyle, Darryl, Honey, Zee, Uncle Mike, Gabriel and even Ben - just seems wrong. That in a  nutshell, is why River Marked didn't really work for me.


The good news is that Briggs is still an amazing writer. She always does such a beautiful job with her books, I feel it is almost impossible not the enjoy them. Which, I did - I enjoyed River Marked. It is just that it wasn't on par with its predecessors. In all honestly, it did not feel like a Mercy Thompson book. By removing the two central characters from their normal settings, surrounding and secondary characters, the story missed out on what makes the earlier books work. River Marked was entertaining and well written, it just did not have the heart that we have come to expect from a Mercy book.

Favorite Quotes

"Nothing says your sorry like a dead bunny."

"I wiggled my hips into a more comfortable position and tried to think like Adam - a very smart person poisoned by testosterone."

"It made me itch this perspective streak of his. But one of the things the last few months had taught me was that it ran both ways. Anyone who tried to hurt my wolf had me to deal with. I might be a thirty-five-pound coyote, but I played dirty."

"Mine. He was mine, and not even death would take him from me - not if I could help it."

"As soon as I got oxygen in my lungs, I screamed Adam's name with a volume that would have done credit to a B-movie actress in a horror film."

"I was the wife of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack - knife fighting was not an acceptable activity."