This is book three in the Mercedes Thompson series, and now I have a dilemma. When the first two and three-quarters books of a series are basically fluff, and then the last bit of book three takes a hard left into Seriously Not Fluff, do you bother with book four?
Spoilers ahead!
Mercy Thompson is a mechanic and a shapeshifter. She turns into a coyote when she wants to. She’s got a Ranger/Joe Morelli thing going on with two werewolves who are in love with her, a vampire has a crush on her, and she’s good friends with some members of the fae. She gets into supernatural scrapes, kicks some ass, the usual stuff. Up until this point, it’s been mostly fun and harmless. Some of the nonsense with the alpha male/wolf thing pushes all my feminist buttons, but it ALSO pushes Mercy’s feminist buttons, so that made that part okay. But then. But then!
End of the book, a human wielding a magic fairy item uses it to subdue and rape her. This is after they met at a bar, where she had a lively conversation with him and he assumed that a woman daring to have a conversation with him was flirting with him. Her not-quite-humanness helps her beat the spell and she kills him, minutes before the werewolf pack shows up to save her.
I don’t get it. Mercy’s been competent and independent and capable for nearly three books. Not that those things guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to you, but why at this point would the author do that to her? We knew the bad guy was bad – he turned out to be the murderer they were hunting for. (He’d been murdering fae to steal magic items.) We didn’t need proof that he was bad. Why take a book series that’s probably shelved under ‘paranormal romance’ in the library and take it so dark?
I like Mercy, and I enjoyed the books up till now, but the ending may have soured me on the rest of the series.
