Dabwaha

If anyone has been following Dabwaha recently, you'll know that Patricia Briggs's Iron Crossed beat out Joanna Bourne's The Spymaster's Lady to win, though not by a lot.

I actually voted to have Patricia Briggs's Cry Wolf win, just fyi. But I happen to be a big fan of both finalists.

Briggs has been writing fantastic urban fantasy for a while. Her world has werewolves and coyote shifters (the main female protag) and vampires and witches and many other beings. Each type of person is fully realized and well-thought-out. No type is wholly bad, or wholly good. The Mercy Thompson series allows Briggs to explore these different parts of her world because Mercy is a coyote, not really a part of any one society, though she has close ties to werewolves because she was raised by their leader. (Cry Wolf is part of Briggs's Charles and Anna series and is more closely focused on werewolves. Since I love werewolves, that's great too.)

Brigg's books have romantic elements, but they're not romance.

The Spymaster's Lady is certainly romance. It's fantastically written with close attention paid to detail, as well as language. There are some clever twists and I completely fell for the heroine and her ingeniuty. I don't read a lot of historical romance, but when I do and I love it, I really love it.

Anyway, there were a lot of good books listed for Dabwaha and I'm going to try to read a few more of them than I have, especially Blue-Eyed Devil by Lisa Kleypas and The Price of Desire by Jo Goodman. Both Dear Author and Smart Bitches ran Dabwaha, and they'll probably run it next year. I'll be keeping an eye out for it. It was a lot of fun!