Patricia Briggs

Patricia Briggs is an American author best known for the Mercy Thompson series, a bestselling urban fantasy line following a Volkswagen-mechanic shapeshifter who can turn into a coyote, navigating a Pacific Northwest populated by werewolves, vampires, and fae in a world where supernatural beings have only recently revealed themselves to the public. Beginning with Moon Called in 2006, the series is known for grounding its fantasy premise in blue-collar, mechanically literate detail — Mercy's garage and car repair work are recurring texture — alongside pack politics and a slow-building central romance with werewolf alpha Adam Hauptman. Briggs also writes the closely linked Alpha and Omega series, which follows characters from the same shared world.

Before breaking out with Mercy Thompson, Briggs wrote fantasy novels set in secondary worlds, including The Hob's Bargain and the Sianim series, and that early fantasy background shows in the careful, consistent rule-building underlying her urban fantasy's werewolf pack hierarchies and fae politics. New readers should start with Moon Called, since Mercy's relationships and the wider pack and fae political situations build continuously across the series. No film or television adaptation exists to date, though Briggs remains one of the most consistently bestselling authors in contemporary urban fantasy and continues to publish new entries in both series.