Burn Bright returns to the world of Charles and Anna and the reader quickly becomes immersed in their lives and that of the wildlings, werewolves too damaged to live with the pack. Charles and Anna work together to find the group attacking the wildings and solve the mystery of who is a traitor in their close knit pack. There is plenty of action, some surprises about Bran and Leah and a warm, strong relationship between Charles and Anna that make for an engrossing read.

The fifth instalment of the Alpha and Omega series, Burn Bright did not disappoint. I loved this book it is a fabulous addition to the series with great characters and an amazing storyline I just love this author and can’t wait to read more. I highly recommend this book and series.

It's hard to dispassionately review these books when they are all so wonderful to read.

Charles and Anna are, this time, thrown straight into the deep end when it turns out there are attacks on the more vulnerable werewolves in the pack at Aspen Creek, and Bran is nowhere to be seen.

Okay, look, he's somewhere to be seen. I think he gets two scenes from his point of view in the whole book, but he's largely absent.

I always enjoy the books in this series that have a strong amount of pack interaction to them. This definitely had that. We had interactions with Leah front and centre, conversations between Anna and Asil, a side plot with Asil and Sage, Tag was there (I don't remember thinking much of him in previous books, but I really loved him this time around), and then of course there are the wildlings, the werewolves who are too old and potentially volatile to be around everyone else full time.

Those are the ones being targeted.

I honestly just read straight through this. I think it could have been twice the length, with more of the wildlings taking big parts, and I would have been fine.

I will say one thing though: I'm curious to see whether we get to see more of Wellesley in next books after such a well rounded introduction.

I have been hanging out for this book for a year.........really looked forward to it. But it fell a little flat for me, it felt like a filler maybe?? It just didn't have the usual 'umph'; the last book was fantastic and I felt like the characters grew and the story was worthwhile. In this case there wasn't any growth or evolution and it just felt off.

I am so thrilled to be back in the world of Patricia Briggs, This book was non stop action that kept me glued to the pages and wanting more, Action, romance, shifters, Fae, wolves and character we have all grown to love, this book is a must read

‘Burn Bright’ is the fifth instalment in Patricia Brigg’s urban fantasy series ‘Alpha & Omega’, a spin-off to her ‘Mercy Thompson’ series.

I thoroughly enjoyed this latest book in Charles and Anna’s story, and I’m so glad because I haven’t been on the greatest reading streak with Patricia Briggs lately ... I was pretty “meh” on the last ‘Alpha & Omega’ book from 2015, ‘Dead Heat’ and thoroughly unimpressed with Mercy’s from last year, ‘Silence Fallen’. But Briggs is one of my favourite authors, and this is one of the few urban fantasy series that I’ve loyally stuck with, when others have fallen by the wayside – so I always feel a little discombobulated when I’m dissatisfied with my once-every-two-years dose.

‘Burn Bright’ follows on from the events of ‘Silence Fallen’ – when Mercy was kidnapped, and werewolf Marrok Bran left his Aspen Creek home to help with her rescue mission. When ‘Burn Bright’ begins, Charles has been left in charge of his Da’s pack for a month, acting as pack leader – and it’s all going relatively smoothly, until he receives word that some of the pack’s wildling werewolves are in trouble in the Montana mountains, seemingly being hunted by a covert operation for purposes unknown …

All of Patricia Brigg’s books are whodunits, that’s a given. But I find myself tending to favour those that stick close to home – both in the ‘Alpha & Omega’ series, and ‘Mercy Thompson’. So I was really happy that ‘Burn Bright’ takes place entirely in Aspen Creek, and reveals more than any other instalment about Bran’s werewolf pack and operations. I just tend to find that Briggs is less likely to go off on unnecessary tangents, introducing superfluous secondary characters and settings we have no connection to (as indeed, I thought she did in ‘Dead Heat’ with a trip to Arizona). ‘Burn Bright’ is brilliant twofold, not only because it’s firmly grounded in Aspen Creek and works to pull readers into the Marrok’s ordering of his werewolf pack – but also because the entire ‘whodunit’ mystery is centred in that pack, and builds upon the relationships with many established secondary characters … like Bran’s mate Leah, and the Moor, Asil.

The mystery in ‘Burn Bright’ is such a good one, and I was buoyed to see a hint of potential to build a bigger bad-guy arc around it in coming books. If that is the case, I certainly have more faith that this could give readers the layers and subterfuge lacking from the fae/Greylords build-up across both series in recent years …

So the plot in ‘Burn Bright’ worked for me, in a way that the last couple of Briggs books hadn’t been. This one felt very tightly plotted, and like it was serving a wider series purpose overall.

The character-building in this instalment though, was sometimes a tantalising mix of too much, and not enough.

For one thing, with Bran not around in this book – it gave Charles and Anna a chance to talk out some things about the Marrok that certainly Anna probably wouldn’t have felt comfortable airing, had he been closer to the pack bonds. In particular, Anna drops some bombshells regarding her observances of Bran and his feelings towards Mercy, which … BLEW MY FREAKIN’ MIND, and then blew it again when Charles conceded her point and agreed with her. This was … I was shook, people. I had never thought of Bran and Mercy in that context (no, not even after the reveal in ‘Silence Fallen’, which now also takes on new meaning – not to mention a certain conversation that Adam and Mercy had early on in the series, about Adam doing the Marrok’s bidding in watching over her) so this was just a whole lot of revelations coming thick and fast and then just left to sit, simmering on readers minds, probably until the next ‘Mercy Thompson’ book most likely (March 2019, for anyone who is counting down).

These revelations also made me yearn, more than ever, for Bran to get his own spin-off. But I think Briggs has repeatedly nixed that idea, citing that he’s just too commanding a presence and would overwhelm any book. But still – Briggs threw these big character reveals about him out there, and now I kinda want her to pick them up and run with them.

But ‘Burn Bright’ also stumbles somewhat with continuing to advance Charles and Anna’s relationship, and in highlighting how loving one another is changing them, for the better. Charles briefly mentions Anna’s restlessness at not knowing what to do with her life. Seeing as werewolves are very hard to kill and can live immortal (or – more likely with all that could try and kill them – at least hundreds of years) it helps if a person can figure out what they’d like to do with all that time on their hands. Charles mentions Anna half-heartedly looking into finishing her music studies, and Bran offering to help them look into adoption … this particular aspect is key, since past books have given readers Anna’s interiority and desire for children (possibly even in defiance of Charles, similar to how his own mother sacrificed himself to have him). I totally accept Charles’ assessment that Anna isn’t the sort of person to feel restless and think that a child will solve all her problems of self – but I still feel like that aspect of Charles and Anna’s relationship (foreshadowed really, by the story of Charles’s mother) will have to come around again, and ‘Burn Bright’ might have been the book to continue laying that groundwork …

But, honestly, these are minor quibbles about Anna and Charles and their relationship. Overall, ‘Burn Bright’ is one of the best Briggs instalments in recent memory. Tantalising character tid-bits are dropped, secondary characters advance in my estimation and a whodunit to sink your teeth into make this a stellar instalment.

5/5