In Iron Kissed, Mercy is recruited by her fae friends to help sniff out (literally) a killer on the fae reservation. When friend and former boss, self-proclaimed gremlin, Zee, is later arrested, Mercy’s search for the killer becomes more frantic -- and dangerous. In other (werewolf) news, Mercy comes to a resolution about Samuel and Adam, but will she live to see it through?

This book crystallized in my mind for me some of the reasons that I love this series so much. Briggs seems to intuitively understand restraint. She doesn’t pad her books and draw every scene out, milking ever last drop. As a writer, it’s tempting to make the reader see exactly what you want them to by writing every little detail. Briggs understands that sometimes, things are better left to each individual’s imagination, and so she uses a light hand during crucial situations. This doesn’t mean the books are bland and description-less; rather, there is a base to work off of in the readers’ mind so that they can supply all of the extraneous details. This is effective for two reasons: 1), the reader inherently makes the story better for his/herself when applying imagination and preference -- this is why the book is always better than the movie. 2) all of the excess scenework that you have to wade through as a reader isn’t there. I know that scenework can be pretty, and you may love how someone describes something in such detail, but when they constantly do that, it gets old. I can't tell you how many times I’ve read Anne Rice or Laurell K. Hamilton and rolled my eyes or said “get to the point already!” A 300-400 page book is often padded our to 600-700 pages. Briggs doesn’t do this. The result is that the books fly by and leave you engaged the whole time, and leave you hungry for the next. Everything seems so brilliantly paced, and everything is necessary.

Now, one thing that almost knocked this particular book back to a 4 for me was a couple of Scooby Doo scenes. It drives me nuts when a villain spills their guts to the good guy, thereby tying up all the loose strings that had you wondering; b) I hate it when one character in conversation to another summarizes the whole book, essentially recapping, and thereby tying up loose strings. These things seem lazy to me, generally. But the reason that this didn’t end up knocking the story back to a 4 was that in both cases where Briggs does this, there was a reason that actually made it work and made sense in the context of the story, as well as expanding the readers‘ understanding of the characters in a way that worked, when anything else would have shown less and seemed clumsy. I ended up being sort of impressed by something that normally drives me insane. (More on this, but it gets spoilery, so it will be on the blog)