Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs Review: Plenty Happens, but What Changes?

Mercy Thompson #4 | First published in 2009

Spoiler warning: This review discusses the aftermath of sexual assault in Iron Kissed and reveals major plot developments, including the ending of Bone Crossed.

Cover image: Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs, published by Ace. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

Four books into Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series, I keep finishing the novels with the peculiar impression that not very much has happened. Bone Crossed is a good example. Mercy faces retaliation from the local vampires, investigates a haunting in Spokane, encounters another exceptionally dangerous vampire and becomes more deeply entangled with Adam’s werewolf pack. There is plenty of plot to summarise, yet the adventure somehow feels smaller than the Harry Dresden and Anita Blake novels I have been rereading alongside it.

I suspect this has less to do with how many things happen than with how much the world changes afterwards. Marsilia remains mistress of the vampire seethe, the werewolf hierarchy survives, and Mercy still has a garage and a life in the Tri-Cities. Her position within that familiar world, however, changes considerably. She becomes a member of Adam’s pack despite not being a werewolf, learns more about her walker abilities, grows closer to Adam and becomes entangled in Stefan’s damaged relationship with Marsilia.

That combination has an appeal of its own. Urban fantasy can grow absurd when every book needs a stronger villain or a greater catastrophe. Mercy is trying to preserve a recognisable life rather than acquire a grand supernatural destiny. But a story that keeps its wider world relatively stable also depends heavily on the immediate conflicts being convincing, and Marsilia’s elaborate solution to her vampire rebellion is one part of Bone Crossed I found difficult to accept.

A Busy Plot in a Persistent World

I am fairly certain I read Bone Crossed during my first encounter with the series. I believe I stopped somewhere after Silver Borne, although I no longer remember why. Reading the novels close together now makes Briggs’ narrative priorities easier to notice.

Marsilia has discovered Mercy’s role in killing Andre, one of the seethe’s most powerful vampires. Adam’s pack complicates direct retaliation, but Mercy’s friends and acquaintances provide other targets. At the same time, Amber, an old acquaintance from college, asks Mercy to investigate a haunting affecting her family in Spokane. This apparently separate problem draws Mercy into the territory of Blackwood, a vampire whose interest in her abilities is considerably more dangerous than the ghost she came to investigate.

Neither storyline lacks incident. Blackwood is eventually defeated, and Marsilia’s confrontation with the conspirators resolves the immediate threat from her seethe. Yet the larger supernatural institutions remain largely intact. Mercy’s membership in Adam’s pack and her developing supernatural abilities are real changes, but they alter her position inside an established order rather than overturning that order.

The early Dresden novels often build towards increasingly spectacular confrontations, while the earlier Anita Blake books generate momentum through bodies, suspects and discoveries. Neither series began with constant upheavals of supernatural politics; comparing Mercy’s fourth novel with the much later developments in its competitors would be unfair. Still, Briggs already has a different rhythm. The action can be over relatively quickly, while the obligations and strained loyalties it leaves behind occupy a surprising amount of the book.

For me, the Spokane investigation never becomes quite as satisfying as the relationships surrounding it. That is a criticism of its execution, not of its modest scale. I would often prefer a tightly constructed local supernatural mystery to another attempt to save the world. Here, though, I was more interested in the consequences of the adventure than in the adventure itself.

Mercy Is Likeable, but Her World Is Not Gentle

My response to Mercy herself remains one of the pleasures of this reread. Anita Blake increasingly rubs me the wrong way: her confrontational manner can make even ordinary conversations exhausting. Harry Dresden is much easier to sympathise with, but his early chivalry, especially his attitudes towards women, regularly got on my nerves. Mercy is stubborn, sarcastic and capable of very poor judgment, yet she seems genuinely likeable. She rarely needs to demonstrate how formidable she is.

She also has an ordinary life worth defending. She repairs cars, knows her neighbours and maintains relationships that existed long before the current supernatural emergency. More importantly, she is comparatively weak. Her coyote form and walker abilities give her unusual advantages, but she cannot simply overpower a werewolf, a vampire or one of the more dangerous fae. Dresden can wield considerable destructive magic even when outmatched, and Anita becomes increasingly powerful as her series progresses. Mercy has to rely more consistently on ingenuity, persistence and the help of stronger allies.

When she stands up to creatures that could kill her almost casually, it therefore feels genuinely brave. Or stupid. Quite possibly both. That imbalance also complicates her insistence on independence. Adam’s ability to protect Mercy does not give him the right to make her decisions, and the hierarchy that gives the werewolf pack its strength can be uncomfortable for someone who has spent much of her life refusing to submit.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of the series is how harsh Mercy’s world feels despite her relatively approachable personality. The early Anita Blake novels are often far gorier, but their detective structure introduces many of the dead as victims to be investigated. In Mercy Thompson, danger more readily reaches people we already know. Friends are threatened or injured, sometimes killed, and involvement in one supernatural conflict can expose someone to retaliation in the next. I have not counted the bodies across the series, so I would not argue that Briggs is objectively more lethal. The difference is where the violence lands. A mutilated stranger and an injured friend create different kinds of unease, regardless of which scene is described more graphically.

Mercy’s friendships therefore provide both protection and vulnerability. The people who can save her also have enemies of their own, while the people she tries to help keep pulling her into situations she is physically ill-equipped to survive. Her reluctance to give up an ordinary life makes sense. Her ability to stay out of trouble remains less impressive.

Marsilia’s Victory: How Clever Was the Plan?

As Blood Bound had already established, the vampires operate through political hierarchy, dependence and coercion. Bone Crossed explores the strains within that structure. Marsilia has lost Andre, Bernard and Estelle are plotting against her, and Stefan’s loyalty has been compromised by his decision to help conceal Mercy’s role in Andre’s death.

The revelation near the end is that Marsilia has turned much of the apparent chaos into a trap for the conspirators. Stefan is tortured, starved and cast out. Marsilia severs his connections to the humans who depend on him, leaving him convinced they are dead. His genuine suffering and apparent rejection of his mistress help expose Bernard and Estelle. The scheme succeeds, at least in its immediate objective.

There is a plausible strategy here. The rebellion was already developing before Marsilia began her deception; Andre had helped foster it, and Bernard and Estelle were hardly loyal followers. Displaying weakness could tempt opponents into acting openly, especially if they expected Stefan to join them. But proving that a scheme worked is not quite the same as proving that it was a good scheme.

Part of what makes Marsilia vulnerable is the impression that she has become unstable and reckless enough to endanger vampire secrecy and provoke enemies she cannot afford. Her treatment of Stefan reinforces that impression. More troubling is the magical trap she has Wulfe set for the werewolves at Uncle Mike’s. Mary Jo nearly dies, and a conflict with Adam’s pack could have had disastrous consequences for a weakened seethe. The trap is not clearly necessary to expose Bernard and Estelle. It looks like an additional gamble at a time when Marsilia is supposed to be eliminating risks to her authority.

The two portraits of Marsilia—erratic and vindictive on the one hand, calculating on the other—are not necessarily contradictory. Someone can be a shrewd manipulator and still make terrible decisions. The novel becomes more interesting if we read her as a ruler capable of outmanoeuvring enemies while misunderstanding her own allies, rather than as a mastermind whose apparent mistakes were all secretly brilliant.

Stefan is the clearest example. The novel does not pretend that discovering his people are alive automatically repairs what Marsilia has done. He has been tortured and deliberately made to experience their loss by someone he served for centuries. Marsilia wins her contest with Bernard and Estelle, but damages one of the most valuable loyalties sustaining her position. She may have misjudged how much she could demand of Stefan simply because he had always obeyed her before.

I can accept that Marsilia is sufficiently ruthless to do this, and that it might flush out a rebellion already under way. I am less convinced that it was the best available way to secure her position. Her victory is real, but so are the unnecessary dangers she appears to have created along the way. That unresolved tension is more compelling than the notion that her final success proves she was in control throughout.

Why Urban Fantasy Heroes Keep Getting Captured

Another pattern has become difficult to ignore during this reread: urban fantasy protagonists are captured with extraordinary regularity. Harry Dresden repeatedly finds himself restrained or in the custody of more powerful enemies; Anita Blake has similar experiences; and Mercy certainly contributes her share. After a few such incidents, I would expect these characters to become much more suspicious of invitations into places where escape looks difficult.

Capture is useful to an author. It deprives a resourceful hero of control, brings the antagonist close enough to demonstrate their power and forces an escape that depends on something other than winning a straightforward fight. But it also creates the problem I discussed in Why Doesn’t the Villain Just Kill the Hero?: a villain who has the protagonist helpless needs a credible reason to preserve that advantage rather than simply killing them.

Blackwood has such a reason. He wants to exploit Mercy’s walker abilities, so keeping her alive and under his control serves his purposes. His leverage over Chad also makes Mercy’s predicament harder to escape through simple defiance. That is considerably more convincing than a villain delaying an execution merely to deliver a long explanation of his plan.

Nevertheless, the familiar cycle of capture, suffering and escape can make even a dangerous adventure feel oddly temporary. The antagonist is eliminated and the hero returns home. The question is whether the experience has changed anything that will still matter in the next book. Briggs generally gives that question more attention than the apparent modesty of her plots might suggest.

The Cost of Keeping an Ordinary Life

Mercy’s recovery from the sexual assault in Iron Kissed is the clearest example. Bone Crossed does not treat the death of her attacker as the restoration of her previous life. Briggs has described deliberately leaving a scene unfinished at the end of the earlier novel, allowing the sequel to reveal what its apparent happy ending could not resolve.

I discussed the difference between survival and recovery in my Iron Kissed review, and the important point here is that Briggs follows through. Mercy wants intimacy with Adam, but she cannot simply decide how her body will respond to what happened. Adam has to recognise that being strong enough to protect her does not mean he can repair the damage, and that protection becomes another form of control if it overrides her choices.

Stefan’s situation offers a different version of the same problem. Marsilia can reveal that his people survived, but she cannot erase what he believed she had done or how deliberately she used his feelings against him. The public conflict has a resolution; the private relationship must find its way forward under changed conditions.

I still find Bone Crossed uneven. The Spokane adventure is less memorable than it ought to be, and Marsilia’s expensive, dangerous strategy is difficult to admire simply because it succeeds. But Mercy remains an appealing protagonist, partly because she lacks the power to make her courage cheap. The familiar people and places of the Tri-Cities are becoming more interesting to me than another escalation of supernatural spectacle would necessarily make them.

There may also be a good reason Briggs allows those places to remain familiar. Mercy has a garage, a home and relationships worth returning to. She is rarely trying to remake supernatural society; she is trying to remain herself while living beside it. Keeping that ordinary life intact can be an achievement, even when she and the people around her cannot return to exactly who they were.

Briggs may be writing smaller adventures than some of her competitors. She is not necessarily writing about smaller consequences.