Burn Bright

Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5)- Patricia Briggs
Ace/Penguin Group
Release Date: March 6, 2018

Rating:
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Warning: Spoilers Ahead!

Synopsis: 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...

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With the Marrock out of town, werewolves Charles and Anna are in charge of their pack- which means when trouble arises, they're the ones who have to deal with it.  Someone is making trouble for the most damaged of their pack members, hunting them, and killing them.  Charles and Anna will have to use all their skills and trust in each other to solve the problem because something even worse than death is stalking them now.

I ended up having very mixed reactions to this book, which surprised me.  I'll start by admitting, I haven't read all the books in the Alpha and Omega series yet.  The short story that started it off ("Alpha and Omega" in On the Prowl) is a favorite of mine, although I've only followed it up with the first two books in the series so far.  So it was frustrating reading Burn Bright when things would get referred to that happened in one of the earlier books (or Briggs' Mercy Thomson series) but Briggs never filled out what those events were, so you were left not sure if it was important or not. There were also a lot of things happening that I never figured out if they were red herrings or actually important: why were there so many surveillance devices hidden around Jonsey and Hester's home? How did the people planting them never get caught when werewolves are supposed to be so sensitive? Was it a coincidence that Anna knew several of the attackers from her time in Chicago or was there something else going on there that I never figured out?  Was some of what was happening so subtle and tricky I wasn't smart enough to figure it out, or did it leave everyone confused?

The beginning of Burn Bright got off to a slow start- strange because we start with an attack on a werewolf and a Fae.  I kept waiting for Hester, and especially Jonsey, and their pasts to become more important to the story.  Jonsey had a house full of hoarded Fae artifacts after all!  By the end of the book I still had no idea if some of the loose threads to the story were going to be picked up in the next book or were just never going to be dealt with, which was frustrating.  Nearly three quarters of the way through the book I was still waiting for things to really get started.  But when things got going it was impossible to put the book down until the last page.  You figure out pretty much at the same time as Anna and Charles who the bad guys are and I was just as surprised as they were!  

There was a lot of unnecessary repetition throughout the book, although as much as some things were explained over and over there were other things that seemed to be dropped.  I think the reader would definitely get more out of this book if they read the rest of the series first.  If you're like me and dropping into this series late in the game I think you have to just accept that you're not going to follow all of it completely and enjoy the book for what it is- a book you'll understand more the second time around, after reading the rest of the series.  But for all its frustrating bits, Burn Bright was very clever and compelling, with some wonderfully dry and witty humor, and made sure that once you got caught in its spell, you didn't want to come out.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review