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 Ah, a great new series with just my kind of heroine. Mercy runs a one-woman garage and just happens to be a skinwalker, a person who was born with the ability to change at will into a coyote. Mercy's world is a combination of the normal (phone calls from her mother trying to set her up) and the abnormal (her next-door neighbor is the head of the local werewolf pack, and she does car repairs for a layback vampire). Enter Mac, a teenager and newly made werewolf, on the run from his mysterious captors. When a crisis occurs, Mercy has to return to the community where she was raised, to seek the help of the national head werewolf, who just happens to be the father of Samuel, the werewolf Mercy almost eloped with as a teen. The plot moves fast. The characters are richly drawn and multi-layered, so it isn't easy to predict how they will act. Mercy is smart, likeable, and gutsy, without being stupidly so. This is a fab new series. Yum.
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Reading the other reviews, I see that a lot of people compare Briggs to Laurell K. Hamilton with most giving Briggs the upper hand, but I think LKH wins hands down. Anita Blake is foolhardy sometimes, while Brigg's Mercy is a more likeable and intelligent heroine; however, LKH wins for character development and world-building hands down, particularly if you compare Mercy to Merry Gentry, my favorite LKH heroine. I found that the narrative slowed to a crawl in parts of Moon Called with Mercy spending pages contemplating who-done-it and werewolf politics. While Mercy's love interests were interesting, they lacked physicality (I'm still not sure what Samuel looked like). Finally, while some of ya'll might complain about Hamilton's excessive love scenes, I could have used a good love scene in Moon Called. There was nary a one! Overall, I really enjoyed Moon Called, I'm looking forward to reading any sequels, and I recommend that romantic fantasy afficionados read it; but LKH's novels are still better.
