Silence Fallen

Silence Fallen is the tenth Mercy Thompson novel from Patricia Briggs, published in 2017. 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 with the Columbia Basin werewolf pack, the local vampires, the various fae, the witches, and the recurring antagonists from previous books.

In Silence Fallen, the political stakes that have been building across the previous Mercy novels reach a new level. Mercy is kidnapped by a powerful European vampire named Iacopo Bonarata, sometimes called the Lord of Night, who has been observing the Tri Cities werewolf pack and has decided that he wants Mercy in particular under his control. Mercy is taken to Italy and held in Bonarata’s seat of power in Milan, with her husband Adam Hauptman and the wider Columbia Basin pack having to figure out how to extract her from the situation without triggering an international supernatural war.

The novel is structured unusually for the Mercy series. The chapters alternate between Mercy’s first person perspective, which has been the standard voice of the entire series, and third person chapters from Adam’s perspective and from various other characters. Patricia Briggs uses the dual structure to show both the direct experience of Mercy in captivity and the wider rescue operation that Adam and the pack are organizing, with the two threads slowly converging as the novel develops. Some longtime Mercy readers found the structural change refreshing while others preferred the more conventional first person voice of the earlier books, but the experiment gives Briggs room to explore the wider supernatural political situation in ways that the standard Mercy first person could not have accommodated.

The European vampire material gives Silence Fallen its particular flavor. Bonarata is one of the more complicated antagonists in the wider Mercy universe, with motives and a moral situation that turn out to be more nuanced than the initial kidnapping suggests. The wider European supernatural community that Mercy gets to see during her captivity expands the world of the series significantly, with implications for future books that have continued to develop across subsequent entries.

For longtime Mercy Thompson fans, Silence Fallen is one of the more pivotal late series entries. New readers should start at the beginning with Moon Called.