Burn Bright

For an excellent review, spoiler free, check out https://allaboutromance.com/book-review/burn-bright-by-patricia-briggs.

Patricia Briggs is back with the more traditional action packed supernatural mystery that I came to expect of her.

SUMMARY (SPOILERS)

Bran is out of the country, trying to help out poor old Mercy, who keeps getting herself into trouble. Charles is left in charge on his place when a call for help come from one Wildlings of the pack. They are a group of werewolves that are too old, powerful and unstable to live among or even near the others.

He and Anna travel to their remote hideout on the mountains, a place where no one is allowed to go, just as no one is allowed to leave. Anna expects to resolve the problem peacefully, but Charles knows that fighting and killing is very much more likely when dealing with the Wildlings.

Arriving at the scene, they find that Hester, an ancient and renowned werewolf have been captured. Her mate Hester, an even more ancient and powerful Fae, asks them to find her. During her search and rescue, she is killed along with some or hr capturers. They were a crew of highly trained soldiers, consisting of humans and werewolves, using a lot of high tech gadgets and magic.

Feeling the broken bonds, her mate kill himself, his grief nearly taking out all of the mountain with him. Charles and Anna finds a note he left behind, hinting of a traitor in the pack. Fearing for the lives of the other Wildlings, they join forces with Asil, Serge and Leah and form 3 separate groups to find and warn them. They all leave mostly separated from each other, in remote regions and often don't pick up the phone when called.

Anna and Asil are paired together and start their visits with the most dangerous of all of the werewolves, a witchborn named Wellesley. Anna can see that he is clearly broken, seeming to be schizophrenic. During their conversation, he attacks her out of the blue, but not with the intention of killing her. He senses she is Omega, and his wolf desperately and literaly hangs on to her for help.

What ensues is an event taken place in the astral plane, where Anna calls for the help of her mate in order to defeat the evil inside Wellesley. Bran, who is supposedly outside the country, lends his energy and that of the pack to help their somewhat psychic battle.

Wellesley being free of his curse is now able tell his story. But not before Leah calls them about another attack that has taken place. Everybody drops what they are doing and go to meet her.

Lots of dead bodies, all of them from the invaders. The two werewolves that are supposed to be there are missing. They find them in a cave nearby. By that time, Charles is almost convinced that the traitor is Leah, and that's why his father is recusing to come back home, because he suspects the same. But during the confrontation with the two missing wolves, one of them says he overheard a name during the fight, Serge, and she flees with the others hot in her trail.

Charles is temporarily incapacitated by some magic, Anna stays behind with him. After a while, one of the werewolves suggests a shortcut they can take to get to Serge faster. During their walk, the werewolf reveals himself to be an ancient and powerful Shapeshifter. Charles fights him, but he is too powerful for him. Anna tries to find help, and Wellesley shows up. It turns out he is the only one capable of defeating the Shapeshifter because of his holy heritage.

In the end, Serge escapes, the Marrock returns, Leah is hurt emotionally, but proves herself to be very tough and stoic in spite of the disthruts of her mate and the others. Oh, and Asil tracks down Serge and...

I absolutely love Patricia Briggs. Mercy Thompson is a great series, but the Alpha and Omega series stole my heart. Anna is one of my favorite characters EVER. (Though this book reminded me that I want to know more about one of the side characters, Asil, because he's always amused me.)

This is the fifth book in the Alpha and Omega series. It actually started as a short story that  was originally published in an anthology in 2007. I own the anthology - somewhere - but it's available as a separate ebook on Amazon. If you want to read the series, you really need to start there. It's where Anna and Charles meet and explains Anna's backstory. But in Burn Bright, Anna and Charles have been mated for a few years and gone on a number of adventures already. Now Charles' father, Bran, “the Marrok” is out of town, leaving Charles in charge of the pack, and of course, they're attacked.

In between pack dominance fights, unraveling curses, and pack bond magic, Anna and Charles track down attackers, heal wounds, and discover people aren't always who they seem to be.

The Mercy Thompson series and the Alpha and Omega series have both been hinting at a grand, over-arching plotline that gets revealed a little more in this book, so that's exciting, and I'm eager to see where this goes. I've enjoyed how the two series are very much their own series, but still exist in the same world and have events going on that affect both sets of characters. I think we'll see a crossover book soon.

I feel a little weird calling it urban fantasy- that IS the genre, but the Alpha and Omega series, in particular, usually takes place out in the sticks. Not exactly urban. (You could call the Mercy books the city and Alpha/Omega the country and not be too far off.)

It's a great addition to the series, if you've been reading them. Not good as a standalone if you don't know the rest of the world already, though!

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

Bran has taken a vacation, so Charles and Anna stay at his house to take care of pack matters. Charles is doing some work in Bran's office when a call comes from one of the wildlings. The wildlings are the members of the pack that are too damaged and potentially volatile to live with everyone else. Charles and Anna take off into the wilderness to figure out what's going on. I really enjoyed this book. I especially liked learning about some of the wildings. I already need more!

★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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Anna was her father's daughter, and her father believed in science and rational thinking. She'd been a werewolf for years now, and she still tended to think about it from a scientific viewpoint, as though lycanthropy were a virus.

Faced with a wall of briar-thorned vines straight out of a Grimms' fairy tale, she'd never had it brought home so clearly that what she was and what she did was magic. Not Arthur C. Clarke magic, where sufficient understanding could turn it into a new science that could be labeled and understood. But a “there's another form of power in the universe” magic. Something alien, almost sentient, that ran by its own rules-or none. Real magic, something that could be studied, maybe, but would never rest in neatly explainable categories.

Burn Bright

Silence Fallen

Burn Bright