Dead Heat - Patricia Briggs
Series: Alpha & Omega #4
Published by: Ace, on 3 March 2015
Genres: Adult, Paranormal, Urban Fantasy
Pages: 336, Format: eBook
Source: Kindle Purchase
Reading Challenges: 2015 New Release Challenge

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.

Dead Heat showed a different side to Charles that was very welcome, seeing how he interacted with a human friend who had grown old and was dying made Charles seem more human as well.

My Dead Heat review:

I really enjoyed this other side to Charles, it made it easier to see exactly what Anna has seen in him from the very beginning as well. Dead Heat had quite a bit of excitement, but the pacing was still pretty slow, because the moments between Charles and Joseph kind of had to be – reminiscing of the past, and having known Joseph in all the different stages of his life made the story a little melancholy as well. And it certainly drove home the point of why a lot of paranormal creatures tend to stay among themselves and not mix with humans too much.

It was great to see FBI agent Lewis again, she was a great addition to Fair Game, and she is a levelheaded character in Dead Heat as well. The main plot in this story was finding and catching a fae that was very dangerous, one who stole children and left a ‘fetch’ in the children’s place. I love the different creatures that are a part of both the Alpha & Omega and the Mercy Thompson world, because while they are known to me as a reader, they are not exactly the same as they are in other fictional universes.

Charles’ softer side was a pleasure to see in Dead Heat, and it made me understand him a little better. Apart from Anna, I didn’t think he ever let anyone close to him, but Joseph – a human – had been his best friend for well over sixty years. And battling with himself to respect Joseph’s wishes to not be made into a werewolf, but to rather let him die wasn’t easy for Charles. Wanting to give life while often having to take life also made me realize Charles has more facets than I had thought, too.

Written in third person point of view mostly from Anna’s perspective, both that point of view, with Anna’s calm personality shining through, and the amazing dialogues made Dead Heat come to life on my kindle. If you’re already a fan of Mercy Thompson, know that the pacing is quite different in Alpha & Omega, and Charles and Anna are very different, both as characters and as a couple, from Mercy and Adam. I really enjoy both series, though, because it shows how good of an author Ms. Briggs is to be able to write stories in the same universe but with characters that are very different from each other.

Some of my favorite Dead Heat quotes:

Anna had taken out the “obey” part when they married. She didn’t want to lie. Listen to, yes – obey, no. She’d had enough of obeying for ten lifetimes. She had, however, left in the part about “one flesh.” With Charles she didn’t lose herself, she gained Charles.

Charles wondered if the reason his dad did not associate much with humans was that they grew old and died. He did not enjoy the sorrow, but he would not have missed the years that he and Joseph were friends, either. Such joy was worth a little sorrow.

She was not impatient, but she no longer trusted life to be good. She had become more conscious, not less, that people died: that she might die, that Charles might die. Death was real to her in a way that it had never been real when she had been human.