Review: Soul Taken

Soul Taken by Patricia Briggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What to say? I started reading this shortly after it was published, got bored and dropped it for other things. I restarted it a few days ago and finished this morning. I feel like this series has got stuck in a holding pattern with close friends/allies having to die or be horribly mutilated in every book.

Adam, Mercy and the pack are having beers in Uncle Mike's fae bar when Marsilia, the head of the local vampire seethe appears in smoke format in a flash of brimstone to warn them that Wulfe, the half-crazed wizard/witchborn/vampire, has gone missing and that Adam's pack will be blamed unless they can find him.

While investigating Wulfe's disappearance, Mercy discovers that there have been many other disappearances, going unnoticed because the others were supernatural beings with very little power, white witches, transient goblins, minor fae etc, all people who had moved to the Tri-Cities because Adam and Mercy had vowed to keep the area safe.

The disappearances are linked to an old urban legend about a creature called the Soul Harvester who killed people with a scythe, coincidentally the subject of a slasher horror movie being shown at the local cinemas which was written by a local man. It seems there was some truth in the story and the scythe may be an ancient magical artefact. Now I have to say I do not like horror films and therefore a book that reads like one is not going to be top of my list of favourite reads.

Also, and this may be over-simplifying but it felt that there was A LOT of talking and musing, and suddenly realising things (which were not shared with the class) and only two action scenes (for want of a better word), or maybe three. Mostly it seemed that either Wulfe, or Stephan was speaking to Mercy in her dreams to move the story along. Even the artefact did a whole brain dump (just like a Bond villain) into Mercy's mind just so that she could understand its motivation and how it gained its power. It felt like tell, tell, tell, fight, tell, tell, tell, fight.

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