Blind Date with a Werewolf: a Novel in Stories

It's been awhile since I read anything by Patricia Briggs, so it seems fitting that her new book, Blind Date with a Werewolf: a Novel in Stories is the first book I read in 2026! 

In Blind Date with a Werewolf, Asil, the Moor, one of the oldest and scariest werewolves, is given the "gift" of five blind dates for Christmas (which, as he keeps repeating to his "Concerned Friends," is completely unnecessary as he doesn't celebrate Christmas). Asil has been barely controlling his wolf for a long time, after the death of their mate (and has been begging his Alpha to kill him, though the Marrock has always refused), and so thinks this is a bad idea. But his friends are betting against him (the rules are that he must stay with his date for 2 hours, no one must run screaming from the other, and Asil is not to kill anyone) and Asil likes a challenge, so he agrees. The five stories in this book tell the tales (or the aftermaths) of his five blind dates.

Prior to starting Blind Date with a Werewolf, I had been struggling my way through another book (which I put aside in order to read this). I was so happy at the speed in which I got into this book; I finished it in about three nights! Asil is a really fun character: he's full of interesting knowledge because of his age, but is still interested in the people and happenings around him. He's physically gorgeous and likes to play this up, but he never seems arrogant (he's just accepting of it as a thing, and often just wants to get past it). While a very dominant wolf, he is very protective of innocents.

His dates themselves are also very entertaining. He starts out with a vampire LARPer; while Asil isn't into men, he has no problems continuing on the date and even dancing with him. From there he meets someone who loves cats (an interesting option for his "Concerned Friends" to choose for a werewolf!), a platonic date with a fellow gardener, a ghost hunter, and a high society swinger. Of course, nothing goes as planned as vampires, witches, wyrms, fae, and other creatures make their way into his dates.

But along the way, Asil also starts to heal, and even finds his wolf talking to him once again! This is largely thanks to his fourth date, Ruby; something about her calms Asil's wolf, and even though they just go on one short date, Asil's wolf is convinced that she is "their" Ruby. I was really happy with how that all developed, and I hope to one day read more about them. :)

I absolutely loved this book. It was such a fun read and a great start to my year. :D 

Fair Game

After reading The Night Circus, I decided to continue on with the fantasy reading.  The Night Circus reminded me of urban fantasy (but without the vampires, werewolves, witches, and fae), so I decided to read Fair Game, the third Alpha and Omega novel.

Fair Game takes place quite some time after Hunting Ground.  Werewolves have outed themselves to the world.  The Marrock Bran has tightened werewolf law; where once young wolves may have gotten a warning, now they are executed if they break that law.  And Charles is the one who gets to do the honours.  He's been sent out as his father's executioner for about a year now.  And the job is killing him. 

Luckily for Charles, he is mated to Anna.  Anna knows what is happening because Charles has stopped playing music and has shut down the bond between them.  She goes to the Marrock, who doesn't listen to her.  So then she gets Asil to help her.  It is Asil who finally gets through to Bran that Charles needs to do something else to get his mind off of all the killings he has had to do for the pack.

Luckily an opportunity comes up that is perfect: there is a serial killer loose in Boston, and the FBI want a werewolf to help them find the culprit.  Bran sends Anna to consult with them, with Charles as her bodyguard.  They discover that the victims have largely been half-blooded fae, along with a few werewolves thrown in since the werewolves have gone public.  Unfortunately for Anna and Charles, helping the FBI puts them on the killer's hit list.

I loved this book.  Reading about Anna and Charles felt like going back to visit old friends.  Fair Game was also a bit of a departure from the way Anna and Charles are in earlier novels though: Anna is in many ways the stronger one here, while Charles is the weaker one (ghosts from his executions are literally haunting him, and he is terrified they will hurt Anna so he has shut the bond down between them to protect her, even though that is hurting her terribly).  I loved the change in Anna in particular because she has grown into herself now, refusing to be anyone's victim (she even says that Charles teaching her to protect herself is the best gift he ever gave her; that he is still willing to come and help her/protect her is the second best).  And seeing Charles truly vulnerable to something was refreshing (and how the power of love literally does save him, because fearing for Anna's life helps him break through the stranglehold the ghosts have on him).

This was the first book though that I felt might have benefited from me reading more from the Mercy Thompson series (which I haven't read since 2009).  A lot of time passes between Hunting Ground and Fair Game and there's even reference to things that have happened to Mercy that I really feel like I should have read first.  But really, it's not a huge deal - those references are only made in the first chapter or so, then Fair Game goes onto its own path.

The characters were also a little hard to follow.  Anna and Charles meet six people initially in Boston: two FBI, two Homeland Security, and two agents from CANTRIP (the agency dealing with supernaturals), then a Fae.  Outside of the two FBI characters, who are around through the whole book, I had a hard time keeping all of the other characters straight, especially since I don't really think the Homeland Security ones show up again (so I kept second guessing myself with names and wondering who was who).  By the end of the book I was fine, but the middle got a bit confusing trying to keep everyone straight.

But like I said, I really did love this book.  I'm glad the series has continued (book 5 was published in 2018) so I'll be able to read more adventures of Anna and Charles in the future. :)

Hunting Ground

I've had a weird relationship with Hunting Ground, the second Alpha and Omega book.  I started it not long after finishing Cry Wolf.  But for some reason I got about 30 pages in and just stopped reading.  Part of it was that I'd taken out a bunch of nonfiction books from the library and wanted to read those.  But the other part was that I just wasn't into Hunting Ground.

So last night, when I inexplicably couldn't sleep, I decided to continue reading Hunting Ground.  I actually just started again from the beginning; I breezed through the first 30 pages again.  Before I knew it, it was 5am and I was halfway through the book (after taking several breaks to attempt to sleep). 

Hunting Ground takes place about a month after the first book.  Bran, the werewolf Marrok of North America, has decided it's time for the werewolves to come out to the rest of the world.  He has arranged to have a conference with members from the European packs, to listen to their concerns and try to offer them help once the North American werewolves go public.  Charles has a horrible premonition about his father going; Bran reluctantly agrees to let Charles and Anna go in his place.  Immediately after this is decided, Charles feels better about it (he has Native American ancestry from his mother's side; the spirits often talk to him in feelings as they were going in this case).

So Anna and Charles go to Seattle.  Anna is doing much better, but still feels uncomfortable around dominant werewolves.  So to solve that problem, Charles asks one of the werewolves, Tom, and his witch wife, Moira, to take Anna out shopping.  On their way back from their second trip, they are attacked by vampires, who try to kidnap Anna.  They (as everyone does) see Tom as much more of a threat than she is; everyone underestimates Moira though, who manages to destroy some of the vampires with sunlight (causing the other four to flee).  As the conference continues, the vampires strike again and again, seemingly with magic they should not have access to.  The human mate of one of the European werewolves is tortured to death.  Then one of the very scary European Alphas is killed in a spectacularly brutal crime scene after he was in a fight with Charles.  The werewolves all know Charles was innocent because there was proof he hadn't been there.  But his scent was all over the place. On top of everything, the fae, Dana Shea, who was hired by the Marrok to oversee the conference (with no bloodshed) came very close to having Charles killed over that fight (and several of the wolves, including Anna, notice that the fae seems to have broken her word...)  Something is very rotten at this conference, and it's up to Anna, Charles, and the Seattle werewolf pack to unravel it before more people are killed.

I enjoyed this book a bit more than Cry Wolf because Anna has had a chance to grow a little bit.  Yes, she's still got problems being around a ton of dominant wolves.  But she's refusing to be cowed anymore.  Moira was a pretty fun character too, although I wish she'd had a bigger part in the book.  And Sunny (the human mate who died to vampires) was a pretty fun character too - it was neat to see what an Omega human would be like within the world.

I think the plot was pretty fun in a murder mystery sort of way.  I kept trying to figure out who the culprit was (since it looked like one of the werewolves at the conference was at least in on the attacks).  I actually had a pretty good inkling of who it would be until something happened that led suspicion away from that character for a bit (although it turns out I was right - I just hadn't figured out the why) ;)

So yeah.  As usual, a fun romp by Patricia Briggs.  It was the perfect distraction while I was having trouble sleeping! :)

Cry Wolf

I love Patricia Briggs’ books.  So I was pretty excited to start reading Cry Wolf, the first book in her Alpha and Omega series.  I got through the prologue, which dealt with a random character, then got thrown into the story at a point that most definitely wasn’t the beginning.  Annoyed, I charged my Kindle, bought and read the novella that takes place before this book, then went back to it.  Now everything made sense (and I knew who all the wolves in the first chapter actually were).

Once I got through that hurdle, I found I had a hard time putting the book down.  I’ve stayed up way too late over the last few nights reading it (I started it at 2am on the 7th, and finished it a little before 4am today).

Cry Wolf is about werewolves Charles and Anna.  Charles is a two-hundred year old very dominant alpha wolf (second to his father, who is the alpha of all the wolves in North America).  Anna is a rare omega wolf, who is sort of like a medicine woman; she exudes peace and can calm the rage of other werewolves.  Anna was turned into a werewolf against her will and brutalized (that all happened in the novella).  She falls outside of pack structure, so dominance doesn’t actually work on her (alpha wolves can normally command more submissive wolves to do things; those commands just slide right off of her).  In her old pack, she was kept ignorant of her powers and was told she was a useless submissive wolf.  With Charles and his father Bran, she starts to realize that she is neither useless nor submissive.

Charles’ wolf decided as soon as he saw her that Anna was his mate.  This is super strange for him as well as her because he’s never had a mate before.  Suddenly he finds himself not only determined to protect her (from danger as well as potential rivals like Asil, an ancient wolf who is almost as old as Charles’ father), but also able to let down his guard and relax (thanks to her Omega powers).

The story alternates between their two viewpoints.  Neither one really talks to the other one (sometimes because they aren’t given the time, other times because they’re afraid to express their feelings).  When they get to Charles’ home in Montana, Anna is overwhelmed and feels like she doesn’t belong.  It doesn’t help that Bran’s mate Leah comes over to make a power play with her, and that Charles keeps wanting to leave her behind on things because he doesn’t want to subject her to seeing him possibly kill again.  Charles is also injured (from the novella - he got shot three times with silver bullets, and one of the bullets wasn’t properly removed).  But he isn’t given a chance to heal because there’s a werewolf attack in the nearby mountains.  As his father’s enforcer, it’s his job to deal with it.  Normally that would mean killing the wolf, but with Anna coming along, there’s a chance they can bring him in peacefully.

But the rogue lone wolf is not the actual problem - he was a man changed when he defended a student in the mountains from an attack.  It seems there’s another wolf running around.  And it looks an awful lot like Asil’s mate who died two hundred years previously. Died to a witch....

This book didn’t do anything amazing, but I still had a lot of fun reading it (like I said, I stayed up waaaay too late while reading it).  I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series (after a break to catch up on sleep though!)

Alpha and Omega: a Companion

I started reading Patricia Briggs Cry Wolf, the first story in her Alpha and Omega series. But I felt like I was in the middle of the story over the first few pages. So I looked it up on Goodreads and sure enough, there's a novella that happens first. Thankfully it was available on Kindle. So I bought it, charged my Kindle, and read it.

This novella is the story of how Charles and Anna met, and what exactly happened to her. She was changed against her will and told for three years she was a useless submissive wolf. Charles is the one who tells her the truth: she is not a submissive, she's an Omega. Omegas has are rare and fall outside of the regular werewolf hierarchy; Anna wasn't submissive, her pack had to beat submissiveness into her.

Together, Charles and Anna confront her pack. Unexpectedly, Charles' wolf claims Anna as it's mate (after knowing her for only a few hours). Together they discover why Anna's pack was so sick. And now she agrees to accompany Charles and the Marrok back to Chicago.

That was a bit annoying, but now I'm ready to actually read Cry Wolf.

Note: I didn't read the version in On the Prowl, but I like the cover better than what the Kindle version had.