May 2, 2011
Intrigue and politics infuse Painter's unique vampire novel. Chrysabelle is a comarré, a human slave bred for beauty and high blood production. On the run after her master's murder, she will do whatever it takes to stay free and alive. Unfortunately, she accidentally took a dangerous magical artifact along with her, and now the ruthlessly ambitious vampiress Tatiana is determined to find her and retrieve it. Navigating the confusing world of her own species for the first time, Chrysabelle falls in with Mal, an attractive but curmudgeonly vampire exile living on the fringes of human society, and his ghost and shape-shifter friends, dragging them into her fight for freedom. Though the book is set more than 50 years in the future, it lacks almost all trappings of science fiction, focusing instead on the vampire court and its Borgia-level byzantine plotting.