Smuggler's Gold

Merovingen Nights #4

by C.J. Cherryh (Editor)

Spring comes to Merovingen...
and plots begin to grow - as tangled as the strange new plants proliferating in tire backwaters of the City of a Thousand Bridges, as dangerous as the ferment of religious mania that threatens hightowners and canalsiders alike...

In debt to the hightown Boregys, approached by the Boregys' rivals, and blackmailed by the fanatic Sword of God, Thomas Mondragon faces a narrowing circle of enemies as he is bound still more tightly in the affairs of the great Houses. Even the dark demimonde of the canals has become unfriendly territory for a man the Sword is seeking either to use - or to destroy.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Anthologies, Speculative Fiction

290 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 4, 1988

About the author

Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. She is the author of more than forty novels. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written.

Reviews

[Macha]

3 and a half stars.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The characters' machinations are as incomprehensible as ever, but Merovingen does seem like a living, breathing world thanks to the (seemingly infinite) number of characters and perspectives. 2.5.

[Edward Brock · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm enjoying the series.