Darkest Mercy: Wicked Lovely, #5 -- Melissa Marr

Hat tip to Harpercollins, yet again, for A) the beautiful covers on these books and B) keeping the design consistent. Matched sets are to be expected when a series is being re-released, but rare in ongoing series.

This is it, guys. Darkest Mercy marks the end of the Wicked Lovely series.

And what an ending it is.

Minor spoilers about the previous installments.

Keenan, the Summer King, is still away. Aislinn is torn between responsibility for her court and her love of Seth; Seth is torn between his own commitments, friendships and promises. Irial is dying and Niall is grieving; Donia is longing for Keenan, but making ready for the coming battle with War.

All that, and Death has come to Huntsdale.

Literally.

Kudos to Melissa Marr. I don't know how she kept all of the threads in this series straight -- or if she had the entire series arc planned way back when she was writing Wicked Lovely -- and I was impressed at how she pulled it all together. If she did it with anything less than a wall-sized chart (or at least a whole lot of Post-Its), I'm very surprised (and again, impressed) that her head didn't explode.

Darkest Mercy brought everything together, and I loved it. No reservations at all. At all. It's just as passionate and heartbreaking and joyful and surprising a conclusion as the series deserved. It brought the story to a close -- there was real, actual closure on all fronts -- and it's exactly the sort of series-ender that makes me want to go back and re-read the whole series again, to take the journey again and to see it from a different perspective.

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Previously:

1. Wicked Lovely
2. Ink Exchange
3. Fragile Eternity
4. Radiant Shadows

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Book source: ILLed through my library.