Win a Copy of Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs

Com­ing out of lurk to enter this won­der­ful contest!

What you like about the Mercy Thomp­son series thus far?

I like Mercy and most of the other char­ac­ters she hangs around. Mostly, I like the fact that Mercy knows her strengths and knows her lim­its. She knows just how far to push to make her­self some­one wor­thy of respect from the were­wolves and just how much to give to make sure they under­stand she isn’t out to threaten them or cause the pack any trou­ble. I like a hero­ine with a good head on her shoulders.

Which title is your favorite and why?

My favorite is Blood Bound, and that deci­sion is made kind of by process of elim­i­na­tion (which is not to say that I didn’t love the other two). Moon Called was a lit­tle thin on the plot and thick on expo­si­tion, but I didn’t mind too much because it’s the first in a series and some ground­work has to be laid in order for the series as a whole to suc­ceed. And Patri­cia Briggs doesn’t make it bor­ing at all. While I liked the prose, Iron Kissed was a strug­gle for me to fin­ish, just because it didn’t get inter­est­ing (to me) until she worked out who was respon­si­ble, and that was the last third of the book. I just wasn’t inter­ested in fae arti­facts or fae pol­i­tics and that’s obvi­ously an issue of mine, and not Briggs’s fail­ure or any­thing. Blood Bound is what I would call per­fect in every imag­in­able way. It was the per­fect bal­ance of action and plot, just the right amount of gore (not too much!) the seethe is inter­est­ing as hell. I also liked the fact that it was more of Stephan’s story. Stephan is my favorite char­ac­ter in the series just because he’s always up to some­thing mys­te­ri­ous and you can never be too sure of his motives. Another rea­son Iron Kissed was harder for me to get through was because Stephan wasn’t present any­where in the story, and it was very notice­able to me because I was con­stantly look­ing for him.

Any rec­om­men­da­tions for Briggs fans who may like some­one else who writes similarly?

I have to con­fess that I don’t read that many urban fan­tasy titles. I read a lot of gay fic­tion though so I can rec­om­mend some stuff in that depart­ment!

OK, I think every­one should try the Psy­Cop series by Jor­dan Castillo Price. It has plenty of char­ac­ters of dubi­ous motives. hehehe The orig­i­nal cov­ers were hor­ri­ble, but they’ve been re-issued in bet­ter cov­ers. Yeah well, enough of my cover shal­low­ness. The sto­ry­line is great! It’s in the mys­tery genre, prob­a­bly hor­ror too, but it’s not too gory. It’s hor­ror because there are lots of ghosts to deal with and themes of death.

A psy­cop unit is a detec­tive unit with one part­ner who has psy­chic tal­ents and one part­ner who is nor­mal (no psy­chic tal­ents). The bal­ance is to ensure that if the psy­chic half of the team is affected by some para­nor­mal attack or what­not, the non-psychic (NP) will be immune–theoretically.

It’s told in first-person (like the Mercy series!) and it’s a won­der­ful exam­ple of first-person nar­ra­tive. Vic, the nar­ra­tor, is the psy­chic half of his unit and he has the abil­ity to inter­act with ghosts. He’s the high­est level psy­chic around but he doesn’t like his abil­ity. To tamp down on that (when he’s not at work) he takes these pills called Aura­cel which are anti-psyactives and block his abil­ity, kinda. Vic spends most of the first book, a lot of the sec­ond book, and most of the fifth book high as a kite but there’s some­thing really attrac­tive about the way he tells a story.

Peo­ple should try it out!