The books in this series are credited as anthologies so I will keep to it although they also can easily be considered multi-author novels - the story flows almost cleanly from story to story - in a lot of cases you actually need to remind yourself who wrote a story.

The second anthology (and third book overall) in the Merovingen Nights series starts shortly after the previous one closed. If you had not read the novel that started it all and the previous anthology, this book will be quite annoying (not to mention that it will spoil the previous 2 books for you). If you read the previous 2 and liked them, you will probably like this one as well.

Generations ago an alien race, the sharrh, defeated the human inhabitants of the planet of Merovin and left them stranded and away from the human civilizations of the Union and the Alliance, without the technology used to get them there. Humanity survived - it split into factions (which got more and more different with time) and built its world, forgetting the stars and that they are not alone. Even the sharrh are only a myth, one that most people do not believe in. By the time the series opens, the aliens are used only to keep people in line - at least in most of the the planet cities - some religions still believe in them. The whole series is a political thriller in the middle of a planet like no other.

In this anthology, we pick up where the previous one left off - after the Sword of God attacked the rulers of Merovingen and used the opportunity to get their spies inside of the city, the machinations of all the groups just continued. It is the season of the Plague - every year people die from the malady coming from the river. Merovingen, the city where the story is based in, is similar to Venice - with the canals at the bottom - except that a whole city is literally built on top of them - the more money you have, the higher you live.

One of the plot-points of the first anthology was the Janes (one of the three main groups) trying to eradicate the Plague in Merovingen. It may have worked - but that does not mean that people do not get sick - and this time one of them is Tom Mondragon - the assassin/spy who is at the center of the story. Being sick and trying to do your job is hard regardless of what you do - doing this kind of a job is impossible. So things get a bit complicated.

The first anthology introduced a lot of new characters, each of them connected to someone we knew from the first novel or to someone introduced earlier. Except that this is a very small city - so before long the lines started to cross and people who were parts of different stories got mixed together. I suspect that by the end of the series, the lines will be so thick and the connections so complete that it will be just a big blob in the middle, with everyone connected to everyone.

The political machinations continue, everyone seems to have at least 2 different agendas (except for the ruling family, the Kalugin, who seem to have only one goal - staying at the top for the father; getting to the top for the children), Rif and the Janes seem to try to continue with their cleaning job (although as it turns out, they are not shy to use some bio-terrorism elsewhere, a few minor characters get snagged into the action and the love story in the middle of it all had almost settled down into normalcy (even if Altair Jones seems to still not believe it most of the time). And some of the mysteries from the previous book are still not resolved.

It is an adventure story with things changing and getting more tangled with every page. I am really enjoying the whole series - a lot more than I expected to. I was worried how the anthology format will work but you sometimes forget you are in an anthology - the styles are a bit different but they blend well together and the story flows through the book, with Cherryh's fragments connecting them and weaving them together. But the separate stories also reuse the same characters with continuity and characteristics and the whole story reads more like a novel than an anthology. ( )

I hadn't heard of the Merovingen books before I picked this up, and I'd assumed it was a fantasy, but it is actually sci-fi (or perhaps it straddles the uneasy border between the two, as humanity may have been stranded on an inhospitable planet by alien aggressors, but the story revolves around the murky politics of the miasma-ridden canal city of Merovingen, with particular focus on the tensions between church and state). Interestingly, the man primed to be the centre of the story (all the right heroic attributes: handsome, mysterious, deadly-but-compassionate, etc) gets sidelined by a nasty bug, and instead the story really revolves around Altair Jones, tenacious young canal-woman, and Raj, a street boy with a complicated past. Though half of the chapters are written by various contributors and the other half by C.J. Cherryh herself, it has almost the seamless feel of a novel. I enjoyed it greatly and I intend to lay hands on more books in this series. ( )

This is the second of the shared world anthologies following the initial Angel With A Sword, featuring stories by: Lynn Abbey, Nancy Asire, C. J. Cherryh, Leslie Fish, Mercedes Lackey, Chris Morris and Janet Morris. ( )