Dead Heat

Patricia Briggs is one of my go-to authors, particularly her Mercy Thompson series.  The Alpha and Omega series is closely connected to Mercy's books - quite a few of the characters are in common and a few plot points cross over.  They also make for a nice fill-in for the long waits in between Mercy books :)

So, when I saw that the new Alpha and Omega novel, Dead Heat, was available at the library, I "wolfed" it down.  These books seem like they never take more than a few hours to digest.

This one left me a little cold, though.  Just a smidge below the usual par.  The characters were themselves, the villain was interesting, the subplots were well-handled.  There were just some strange exchanges here and there.  Especially the day when Anna and Charles went out separately to investigate the child abductions - there were times where I had trouble following the flow of the conversation and action.  An awful lot was introduced in a short time period, and it made for an awkward series of very short wrap ups near the end of the book.

There also seemed to be a weird amount of attention paid to peoples' driving skills, considering there wasn't much in the way of actual chase scenes or the need for hell-for-leather driving.

The horse-centric story lines were interesting, and it was nice to find out some big chunk's of Charles' history.  He's been a bit of a blank slate up till now.

Final call:

I wouldn't miss this installment in the series, but it's not the strongest one, either.