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.
I know exactly how you feel (because I felt and thought exactly the same way when I finished this book). Having just read this very insightful post (and subsequent comments discussion) on rape in popular media: http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2015/06/mad-max-fury-road-makes-rape-arguments-invalid/ I was actually thinking of this book, and the way it was dealt with afterwards.
If I were you, I’d read the next book or two, if nothing else, because it deals very frankly with the aftermath, which a lot of rape depictions don’t seem to do – they just skip ahead to a time in the future when all the healing is done. Mercy is not fine, for quite some time, and needs help and time to get over her assault. I thought that was dealt well with, without making it all about the men around her (which such stories sadly frequently turn into). But do I ultimately wish that Briggs hadn’t used this story trope in the first place? Of course.
Thanks for the link (it’s blocked at work, but I’ll read it tonight), and for the validation. Maybe I won’t completely give up on the series. When the very end of the book was Mercy jumping into bed with Adam, I figured that’d just be the end of that and it would never be mentioned again. Which would be good on the one hand, but on the other hand even more maddening to include it and then pretend it never happened. So I guess it’s good that there’s some processing, but ugh, Patricia!
You know me. I’m not the forgiving type. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice… There’s too much good stuff to read out there without sticking with something that sucks. Just saying. I totally agree with you about some writers not having any idea where their story arcs are going. Makes me appreciate Lois.