Frost Burned

Frost Burned is the seventh Mercy Thompson novel from Patricia Briggs, published in 2013. 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 Frost Burned, Mercy and her stepdaughter Jesse are out shopping on Black Friday when their car is rear ended in heavy traffic. Mercy reaches for her cell phone to contact Adam and discovers that her husband and the rest of the Columbia Basin pack have been kidnapped by a group of attackers whose identity and motives slowly become clear across the rest of the novel. The pack alphas of the western United States are being targeted by someone with the resources and the planning to take them all at once, and Mercy has to figure out who is behind the attacks while also working to free her husband and the rest of the pack from captivity.

The political stakes in Frost Burned are higher than in many of the previous Mercy novels. The targeting of multiple pack alphas suggests an antagonist whose plans extend beyond just the Columbia Basin pack, and the implications for the wider supernatural and human relationships in the United States become increasingly serious as the case develops. Briggs handles the escalating stakes with the kind of careful pacing that her readers have come to expect, with the personal danger to Adam and the pack giving the novel its emotional engine while the wider political plot provides the structural framework.

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. 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, Frost Burned is a pivotal entry. New readers should start at the beginning with Moon Called.