Moon Called is the first book to kick off the very successful Mercedes Thompson series. While it follows the urban fantasy formula through incorporating vampires, shapeshifters, fae, and ghosts, it has the opportunity to differentiate itself with high quality world-building.
The main character, Mercy, isn’t the prissy princess nor is she the leather-clad potty mouth badass. She works as a mechanic, getting her hands dirty the blue-collar way. She’s not quite human though. From her Blackfoot Indian heritage she has inherited the ability to shift from human to coyote. The official term is a “walker”, but she likes to keep this knowledge low-key as there are very few of her kind left.
Unable to care for her as a newborn, her mother turns her over to a werewolf family to raise her. While she shares certain similarities with their kind, she isn’t quite as bound by their laws which makes for and interesting slippery slope as she works together with them throughout this series. In this particular book, the Were community runs into significant problems as someone is illegally creating new werewolves and performing experime
nts on them. Mercy calls upon the help of all of her supernatural friends to get to the bottom of it, so we learn a bit more about the vampires, fae, and were alike.
Overall, I started out really interested and then my interest sort of waned and it really began to slow down. Surprisingly enough, I was more engaged with development of the Were community instead of the vampires, though the vampires certainly seem to have their own qualities to stand apart from other series. I hope that I am more interested in the future books.
Even with Mercy’s sort of bland personality, I think there’s definitely potential for greatnes
s. The ingredients are all there, especially a good supporting cast. I can see myself becoming a fan of the local Alpha, Adam Hauptman. Some of my favorites series start off with less than stellar beginnings, so that won’t keep me from giving the next book a read.