Seduced by Moonlight

by Laurell K. Hamilton

Cover image

Series: Merry Gentry #3
Publisher: Ballantine
Copyright: February 2004
ISBN: 0-345-44356-X
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 384

Buy at Powell's Books

This is the third book in the Merry Gentry series. You definitely don't want to read it before reading the previous books.

I am really liking this series. I didn't expect it to win me over as much as the Anita Blake series did, since the atmosphere and tone of the Anita Blake books is just perfect and Merry isn't quite as sarcastic, but I'm falling in love with Hamilton's portrayal of fairy. Particularly the unseelie.

Hamilton's books rarely last me more than a couple of days, and this one was no exception. The combination of the fast-reading style, the pacing, and the suspense always pulls me in. It's a hard series to read with long spans between books, and if you've not read any of them yet, I recommend getting them all and reading the whole series back to back.

The interplay between the men in Merry's life gets less annoying in this book and the court intrigue gets more intense, making it an improvement over the previous installment in the series. The level of actual sex goes up considerably again, possibly even more than the first book, so be warned if that isn't your thing.

What I like the most, though, is the world of fairy that is slowly being built up. This book adds considerably more to the underlying structure, showing more of deity and the powers of the world. I love the unseelie attitude, and the mixing of horror and attraction, of revulsion and loyalty. Power always has an edge of danger and sacrifice to it, and the characters have to make hard decisions and accept real consequences for their actions. Merry succeeds by being very bold and very careful in turn, in a way that makes the intrigue feel much more real than it often feels in other books. The mix of contrasts I know is going to find itself into my own ideas about the fey; it's captured so very well.

If the idea of a book where quite a bit of the plot happens in what can be accurately described as an extended orgy doesn't bother you, I highly recommend this series and this book. The sex is everpresent but not particularly gratuitous, at least given the characters and the world background, and the combination of excellent first-person writing and some fascinating world-building will draw you right in.

Followed by A Stroke of Midnight.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2004-03-01

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04