Silence Fallen by Patricia Briggs

Goodreads Blurb:

Attacked and abducted in her home territory, Mercy finds herself in the clutches of the most powerful vampire in the world, taken as a weapon to use against alpha werewolf Adam and the ruler of the Tri-Cities vampires. In coyote form, Mercy escapes only to find herself without money, without clothing, and alone in the heart of Europe...

Unable to contact Adam and the rest of the pack, Mercy has allies to find and enemies to fight, and she needs to figure out which is which. Ancient powers stir, and Mercy must be her agile best to avoid causing a war between vampires and werewolves, and between werewolves and werewolves. And in the heart of the ancient city of Prague, old ghosts rise...

The Mercy Thompson books are on my "auto buy" list. I've stuck with this series for a long time (I mean, Silence Fallen is book #10 of this series and it's still going strong) and don't plan on quitting any time soon.  I went out and bought this one when it was released in March of last year...and yet I only JUST finished it.  And, to add insult to injury, I listened to the audiobook from my library rather than read the hardcover I purchased almost a year ago.  Whoops.

So why the delay?  Well, to be fair, I did try to read my hardback copy when it first came out.  I was surprised to find that Silence Fallen is written from both Mercy's and Adam's POVs.  I don't much care for alternating chapters of different POVs...so that coupled with the fact that I probably wasn't in the mood for an urban fantasy made me put this one down last year.

Cue 2018 and the husband and I are getting ready to move house to a couple of states away and I don't really want to move books I don't plan on keeping.  Yet, rather than pick up my hardback, I decided to listen to it.  As an audiobook it was ok -- two voice actors read the story which was a nice way of differentiating between Mercy and Adam.  I managed to finish it this time via the audiobook so I guess it was good for that purpose (even if I found it hard to listen to voices interpret the stories I've voiced on my own for years).

I was really wavering on what to rate Silence Fallen.  The two POVs threw me off because Briggs hasn't used that device (that I can remember) in any of the earlier books.  Also, the timeline is not linear either so it was a bit confusing keeping Mercy's timeline location and Adam's timeline location straight in my head.  Add to that a ton of backstabbing and a variety of characters and Silence Fallen just seemed too busy.  Based on the story alone I'd probably lean more towards a 3.0 or a 3.5 star rating for this installment of the Mercy Thompson books.  The fact that it's characters I love (more Stefan, though, please) and a world that I love bumps it up to a 4.0 rating.

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