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.

Book Summary

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.