In the supernatural realms, there are creatures who belong to winter. I am not one of them. But like the coyote I can become at will, I am adaptable.

My name is Mercy Thompson Hauptman, and my mate, Adam, is the werewolf who leads the Columbia Basin Pack, the pack charged with keeping the people who live and work in the Tri-Cities of Washington State safe. It’s a hard job, and it doesn’t leave much room for side quests. Which is why when I needed to travel to Montana to help my brother, I intended to go by myself.

But I’m not alone anymore.

Together, Adam and I find ourselves trapped with strangers in a lodge in the heart of the wilderness, in the teeth of a storm of legendary power, only to discover my brother’s issues are a tiny part of a problem much bigger than we could have imagined. Arcane and ancient magics are at work that could, unless we are very careful, bring about the end of the world . . .

The Mercy Thompson series is a comfort read for me. I slipped back into Mercy’s world easily and happily as soon as the book started. Perhaps it’s just the timbre of Lorelei King’s narration but, despite all the threats and the acts of violence, I find being in Mercy’s world soothing. It’s a dark place, edged with remembered pain and clouded with the potential of future loss but, at its heart, it’s a good place to be.

I like that although neither Mercy nor Adam are the biggest badest creatures around, they’ll still do what they can to make bad situations better. I also like that their actions have consequences that persist for more than one book. They carry their scars, emotional and physical, with them from one book to the next. Mercy is still being threatened by the head European vampire who abducted her and left Adam for dead in ‘Soul Taken‘. The threats are in the form of phone calls. That may not sound scary but Patricia Briggs makes it chilling both from the content of the calls and the fact that they are a constant reminder to Mercy that she he will know where to find her when he finally comes to kill her and her people.

‘Winter Lost‘ is the fourteenth Mercy Thompson book, which is a point where a series is in danger of going stale, repeating the same plots with slightly different costumes and backgrounds and with the same hero turning up to face the same foe time after time so that you feel like you’ve read the book before. i think Patricia Briggs has done a good job in keeping the series fresh. She’s allowed Mercy to change over time as a result of the experiences she’s been through. She’s successfully negotiated getting Adam and Mercy from unresolved sexual tension to being an established married couple without making them boring. Most importantly, she’s started to use multiple points of view to tell the story. In this book, as well as having the story told partly from Adam’s point of view, Patricia Briggs uses ‘Interludes’ to describe what is happening to the pack members while Mercy and Adam are away. All of this deepens my engagement with the series.

The plot of ‘Winter Lost‘ melds Norse mythology and First Nation mythology into something unique. Patrica Briggs has a knack for making the gods in her story disturbingly alien while still creating points of empathy that make them feel real. This time, Mercy finds herself searching for a magical artefact while trying to prevent Ragnarök. I love that, in Mercy’s world, a plot like that makes sense. I enjoyed that, by setting of the story in a remote Victorian resort hotel next to an ancient hot spring in the Montanna Mountains during a record-breaking blizzard, Patricia Briggs provides a venue that combines Norse and First Nation myths and sets up something close to a golden-age locked-room mystery, with a colourful cast of new characters as suspects in the theft of the missing artifacts.

I had a good time with this book and I’m keen to see where the series will go next.