Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs

I read this, book 3 of the Mercy Thompson series, as a filler, something to tide me over until the next Diana Gabaldon book comes on Monday. So maybe you'll want to take my review with a grain of salt; it's tough going from an epic historical fantasy to something more simple and young-adultish. Not that I don't like this series. It's light, straightforward, and features a love triangle between a pretty normal girl and two powerful werewolves. I'm just saying that it was jarring.

On to the review. Like I said, this is book 3 of the series. I'll go back and review the first two another time; I really like to get these written directly after reading. Since it's been several weeks since I started the series, I think it wouldn't be fair to review books 1 and 2 until I re-read them. And I would recommend you read them also before continuing with this review.

Once again, Mercedes gets herself into a situation that is more than she can really handle. This time, it's a series of murders that the fae ask her to help investigate until they decide that she knows too much, and then they tell her to leave it to them.

You ever walk into a college lecture about something you have no knowledge of? Like, medieval poetry or advanced calculus? And even though you know the professor knows what he's talking about, and what he's saying makes perfect sense to him, you're left floundering to connect any dots to create meaning from the English words he's speaking but that you don't comprehend? Yeah, that's kind of where I existed in this book. Surprising that 280 pages can be so confusing. Although I think I got the general idea, I couldn't help but feel like I was missing something while reading this book, like Briggs had assigned supplementary reading and I missed that email. It really felt as if she had more to say in this story but she ran out of time. If she had given the manuscript to another few beta readers who could point out those odd little holes where more filling was needed, it could have been a very interesting story. It certainly wasn't bad enough to make me stop reading the series, because I still want to find out what happens next to Mercy and her little band of werewolves, but I was sorely disappointed in this book. Here's hoping book 4 brings us back to Briggs' fast-paced, but fully fleshed-out, realistic storytelling.

• Series: book 3 of 10 (so far)
• Number of pages: 287 (paperback mass-market edition)
• Year published: 2008
• Days to read: 2 days