In a strange borderland where the dead sometimes rise, lonely marshal Hart and overworked undertaker Mercy detest each other face to face while unknowingly falling in love through anonymous letters. Their secret intimacy collides with growing danger, family burdens, and the revelation that each has trusted the very person who infuriates them most.
If The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy sustained you on capable enemies denying an intimacy the reader can already see, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy turns that exquisite frustration into a secret-correspondence trap. Hart, a lonely marshal hunting the restless dead, and Mercy, the undertaker who receives his bodies and his worst barbs, unknowingly become each other's safest correspondent. Every warm letter deepens the irony of their face-to-face hostility while rising danger in Tanria keeps death, duty, and desire entangled.
Choose it when the mutual denial, witty friction, and cathartic emotional break mattered most.
Bannen's voice is more modern and macabre than Knightley's lush old-fashioned diction, but it shares the same trick of making sincere yearning and absurdity occupy one breath. Expect zombies, animal postal workers, prickly professional competence, adult heat, devastating grief, and a healing payoff—on smaller communal stakes than Knightley's rival Orders and widening conflict.
They fall in love twice: once in ink, once through the hate.
