Proceed With Caution:
This book contains blood, violence, death, murder, abuse, mentions of rape, slavery, and a hanging.
The Basics:
The Fiery Cross picks up right where Drums of Autumn left off, so be sure to read that one first, along with the rest of the earlier books. Brianna and Roger are about to get married (for real this time), but of course, they cannot just be left in wedded bliss. As always, this is an epic story with lots of happenings. If you're not already invested in these characters, you're probably not going to find it interesting.
My Thoughts:
The Fiery Cross started off slow, as to be expected, but it's one very long day. And I mean long. I was just reading and reading and reading when suddenly it hit me that it's still the same day! Did we need to know every single micro-event leading up to the wedding? Probably not, but that's what we get. It does pick up a bit from there, so don't despair.
While I did enjoy The Fiery Cross overall, it felt like a string of random life events rather than one cohesive story. It was almost as if the author had a timeline of miscellaneous events and just stuck them all here. There's a wedding, then back home for a bit, Claire does some healing, her and Jamie set out and do some crazy stuff, back home for a bit, meeting with the Natives, Brianna and Roger are going through it, and just lots of randomness.
There's a murder mystery at Jocasta's wedding which was dragged on for quite a bit. Then it isn't solved and completely dropped until the very end of the book. I know that investigations took much longer in this time, but I was interested and wanted to know what the heck was going on, only to get moved on to the next set of random events. The Fiery Cross took me forever to read because it didn't flow. The entire book was like this: pulling me in, only to switch to something boring.
While the novel as a whole was pretty up and down, I loved the ending! It was back to the Sci-Fi elements and was sooo interesting! I need to know more! If all, or at least a good chunk, of The Fiery Cross had been like that, it probably would have been my favorite of the series thus far. I do hope these findings are focused on in the next book!