In a nine hundred square mile strip of the Edge lays the
Mire. The Mire is wedged between the world of magic, the
Weird, and the world of non-magic, the Broken. The Dukedom
of Louisiana sends its exiles and criminals into the Mire,
an area of swamp and muck. Among the inhabitants of the
Mire live two feuding clans, the Mars and the Sheerilies.
When Cerise Mar finds the Sheerilies squatting in her
grandfathers home and her parents missing, she is suddenly
cast as the Mar clan leader and must take her family into
war with the Sheerilies. As she sets out to legally
retrieve her family property, she ends up paired with
William, a blueblood or nobility from the Weird, who is
traveling through the Mire also.
Lord William Sandine is not your common blueblood. He is an
ex-soldier who left the Weird due to the politics there and
was living in the Broken. He is also a changeling. When
agents of the Mirror, from Adrianglia, come to enlist his
aid in capturing a Hand agent known for murdering changeling
children, William accepts. The Hand agent, Spyder, was
known to be in the Mire searching for something that would
give the Dukedom of Louisiana the edge for going to war
against the Adrianglians. William's orders were to find
out what it was that Spyder was searching for, stop him at
any cost, and to bring the item back to the Mirror. His
personal goal was to see Spyder dead.
As Cerise's and William's paths merge, they find they have a
common goal. Cerise must fight the Hand to save her
parents, and William must find out what it is the Mar family
has that the Hand wants so badly. The relationship of the
two goes from hired help/bait to a building attraction.
Cerise is attracted to the dangerous and handsome William
but, because of her position within her family, she doesn't
know if she can trust him enough to let him in. William has
to fight the inner wild within him that is extremely
attracted to Cerise, as he knows no woman would want
anything to do with a changeling.
BAYOU MOON is the second in Ilona Andrews' The Edge series.
The world building for this fantasy is nothing short of
brilliant. In The Edge, the people live poor and hard
lives. They can cross to the Broken if their magic is not
too strong to shop at Wal-Mart or travel to the Weird and
purchase magical wares. The social structure and politics
of the alternate reality are strongly constructed as are the
characterizations and relationships.
About the author: Ilona Andrews is actually a husband-wife
team. Andrew and Ilona are New York Times bestselling
authors who, under the pseudonym Kate Daniels, write a
series set in an alternate Atlanta.
Cerise Mar and her unruly clan are cash poor but land rich,
claiming a large swathe of the Mire, the Edge swamplands
between the state of Louisiana and the Weird. When her
parents vanish, her clan’s long-time rivals are suspect
number one.
But all is not as it seems. Two nations of the Weird are
waging a cold war fought by feint and espionage, and their
conflict is about to spill over into the Edge—and Cerise’s
life . William, a changeling soldier who left behind the
politics of the Weird, has been forced back into service to
track down a rival nation’s spymaster.
When William’s and Cerise’s missions lead them to cross
paths, sparks fly—but they’ll have to work together if they
want to succeed…and survive.