Fire Touched

Fire Touched is the ninth Mercy Thompson novel from Patricia Briggs, published in 2016. The Mercy Thompson series is one of the most respected and most consistently successful urban fantasy franchises of the past two decades, following the Tri Cities Washington mechanic and skinwalker Mercy Thompson through the kinds of cases that the supernatural community keeps generating around her. By this entry the wider Mercy universe is densely populated. The Columbia Basin werewolf pack that Mercy has joined through her marriage to Adam Hauptman, the local vampires, the various fae, the witches, and the recurring antagonists from previous books all have ongoing plot threads that the new entry has to navigate.

In Fire Touched, the political situation between the supernatural communities and the human world reaches a new crisis when a young human boy named Aiden, kidnapped years earlier by the fae and changed by his time in their realm, ends up in Mercy’s protection. The fae want him back. The human authorities want him handled in ways that the supernatural community cannot allow. And the Columbia Basin pack has to figure out how to protect a child that almost everyone wants for their own reasons. The case develops into the kind of larger political crisis that Patricia Briggs has been building toward across multiple books, with the implications for the wider supernatural and human relationships extending beyond this novel into the books that follow.

Patricia Briggs writes urban fantasy with the kind of careful world building and character work that has made her one of the most respected names in the genre. The Mercy Thompson universe and the parallel Alpha and Omega series share a common world but each focuses on its own central character, and the dual track structure has let Briggs explore corners of the universe that either main series alone could not have developed. Mercy herself is one of the most distinctive heroines in urban fantasy. Capable, stubborn, morally serious, and unwilling to back down from situations that the more careful characters around her would prefer she avoided.

For longtime Mercy Thompson fans, Fire Touched is a pivotal entry that advances several long running plot threads in significant ways. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order starting with Moon Called, but the cumulative weight of the wider story makes it worth the time investment. The Mercy Thompson series remains one of the gold standard projects in modern urban fantasy.