The Stuart Vampire

Set in 1660, Henry Stuart, the young Duke of Gloucester and younger brother of Charles II, is a man of firm moral conviction until smallpox nearly claims him. Recovering at twenty, he finds his fate changed. Griselda di Cuorenero, a Contessa and one of the Devil's mistresses, has long admired him from a distance, and she makes him a vampire, pulling him into a nocturnal existence.

Henry quickly learns that the most frightening things he will meet are not supernatural. In Coffin's Bishop, a village where everyone knows everyone's business, he meets Susanna Edmonds, a young woman who has been brutalised by people far crueler than any vampire. Can love offer them a way out of the cruelty they have endured, and what would it cost? Henry must decide where his humanity ends and his hunger for blood begins.

The novel comes from the author of His Last Mistress and is written as a dark gothic tale in the tradition of The Monk.