Blood Bound / Patricia Briggs

4 out of 5 stars

Mechanic Mercy Thompson has friends in low places-and in dark ones. And now she owes one of them a favor. Since she can shapeshift at will, she agrees to act as some extra muscle when her vampire friend Stefan goes to deliver a message to another of his kind.

But this new vampire is hardly ordinary-and neither is the demon inside of him.

More Stefan and more vampires. Yay! And these are dangerous vampires, not cutesy ones. Mercy faces them all bravely and it turns out that her feminine ways of doing things are more effective than all the macho werewolf snarling in the world. My impressions of Stefan (a character I like very much) are morphing—he is changing from a supernatural buddy into someone tall, dark, and dangerous!

The more I learn about Briggs’ paranormal world, the more I like it. She takes the stereotypical vampires, werewolves and fae and does interesting things with them. Despite the changes, it is fairly easy to keep up with who can do what and why—but the explanations are worked into the book well, not as annoying info dumps.

I guess I’m older than the usual target audience for urban fantasy—I’m well beyond the stage of thinking that competing men, vying for my attention, is a wonderful romantic thing. So I’ll be very glad if Mercy chooses one of them in the next book or two and we can get on with sub-plots that are of more interest to me. Fingers crossed.