Review: Dead Heat by Patricia Briggs

Dead Heat
(Alpha & Omega, #4)
By: Patricia Briggs
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: March 3, 2015
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Rating:

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For once, mated werewolves Charles and Anna are not traveling because of Charles’s role as his father’s enforcer. This time, their trip to Arizona is purely personal, as Charles plans to buy Anna a horse for her birthday. Or at least it starts out that way…

Charles and Anna soon discover that a dangerous Fae being is on the loose, replacing human children with simulacrums. The Fae’s cold war with humanity is about to heat up—and Charles and Anna are in the cross fire.

The story is primarily about Charles buying Anna a horse for her upcoming birthday. He takes her to Arizona where a longtime (human) friend of his breeds and shows horses. However, when they get there what was supposed to be a care-free trip turns into one about love, friendship, and death.

I love Anna and Charles but I did not love this book. It was way too slow. I found myself bored with it a lot of times. The only thing that kept me interested was the kidnapping that takes place. Otherwise, I was a little bored when it came to Charles and Anna looking and talking about horses. Between investigations and close calls, they would go back to the ranch and talk shop while the rode and assessed the horses. I just felt like it was all over the place. I’d have enjoyed the story more if the horse shopping was saved until the end, after all the fae stuff was out of the way.

I did like that this story dealt with family and friends. In the beginning of the book, Anna is pressuring Charles to have a kid with her. She wants a baby of their own and Charles doesn’t want anything that will make him weak. Let alone he has kept his heart sealed off from all but a few people. Having a child is just one more person who could be hurt and ultimately crush his heart. So of course, when they get to Arizona and children are being kidnapped by a fae, his protected side comes out. Not to mention that while they are dealing with that, Charles is also dealing with his very old friend who’s on his deathbed. There was just a lot of stuff for Charles to emotionally deal with in this story.

It’s not that I didn’t like this story, it wasn’t bad, I just didn’t like it nearly as much of any of the previous books. Charles is the bad-ass enforcer that everyone fears and I didn’t get that in this story. If you handed me this book, changed the characters names, I would not have been able to say that it was an Alpha & Omega story. It just didn’t have any spark to it. I also wasn’t a huge fan that these books need to be read alongside the Mercedes Thompson series. There are references in this story to events that apparently happened in the other series that I didn’t get because I didn’t read them. I feel, and this is my personal opinion, that if you are going to write a series or a spin-off series, it should stand on it’s own and be separate from the series it came from. I shouldn’t feel like I need to read the author’s other series just to not feel like there are time gaps between books.

“Most people carry a monster within. Not just werewolves or fae, most people. That monster has nothing to do with our wolf except that the wolf makes it more dangerous. It’s a monster born of our own selfish desires and the wounds that life leaves on all of us. Whether those lived are a couple of decades or a couple of centuries long, living means that we get hurt, and some of those wounds don’t heal or they don’t heal completely.”

Previous reviews from Alpha and Omega
Alpha and Omega
Cry Wolf
Hunting Ground
Fair Game