Burn Bright
by Patricia Briggs
Urban Fantasy
308 pages
Published March 2018

I absolutely love Patricia Briggs. Mercy Thompson is a great series, but the Alpha and Omega series stole my heart. Anna is one of my favorite characters EVER. (Though this book reminded me that I want to know more about one of the side characters, Asil, because he’s always amused me.)

This is the fifth book in the Alpha and Omega series. It actually started as a short story that  was originally published in an anthology in 2007. I own the anthology – somewhere – but it’s available as a separate ebook on Amazon. If you want to read the series, you really need to start there. It’s where Anna and Charles meet and explains Anna’s backstory. But in Burn Bright, Anna and Charles have been mated for a few years and gone on a number of adventures already. Now Charles’ father, Bran, “the Marrok” is out of town, leaving Charles in charge of the pack, and of course, they’re attacked.

In between pack dominance fights, unraveling curses, and pack bond magic, Anna and Charles track down attackers, heal wounds, and discover people aren’t always who they seem to be.

The Mercy Thompson series and the Alpha and Omega series have both been hinting at a grand, over-arching plotline that gets revealed a little more in this book, so that’s exciting, and I’m eager to see where this goes. I’ve enjoyed how the two series are very much their own series, but still exist in the same world and have events going on that affect both sets of characters. I think we’ll see a crossover book soon.

I feel a little weird calling it urban fantasy- that IS the genre, but the Alpha and Omega series, in particular, usually takes place out in the sticks. Not exactly urban. (You could call the Mercy books the city and Alpha/Omega the country and not be too far off.)

It’s a great addition to the series, if you’ve been reading them. Not good as a standalone if you don’t know the rest of the world already, though!

From the cover of Burn Bright:

In her bestselling Alpha and Omega series, Patricia Briggs “spins tales of werewolves, coyote shifters, and magic and, my, does she do it well” (USATODAY.com). Now mated werewolves Charles Cornick and Anna Latham face a threat like no other – one that lurks too close to home…

They are the wild and the broken. The werewolves too damaged to live safely among their own kind. For their own good, they have been exiled to the outskirts of Aspen Creek, Montana. Close enough to the Marrok’s pack to have its support, far enough away to not cause any harm.

With their Alpha out of the country, Charles and Anna are on call when an SOS comes in from the fae mate of one such wildling. Heading into the mountainous wilderness, they interrupt the abduction of the wolf – but can’t stop blood from being shed. Now Charles and Anna must use their skills – his as enforcer, hers as peacemaker – to track down the attackers, reopening a painful chapter in the past that springs from the darkest magic of the witchborn . . .