THE ETERNAL HEIR

A young American woman discovers her vampiric heritage in Viola’s debut urban fantasy novel, the first in a series.

Ava Schmidt thought she knew who she was. But three years ago, she learned that the woman who raised her—whom Ava always believed to be her grandmother—was hiding the truth about her origins. The only clue about her birth mother is contained in a postcard sent from Berlin, Germany, so Ava packs up her life and moves from Long Island to the German city in the hope of discovering her real family. One night, after a post-work drink with colleagues, Ava is attacked while leaving the bar. She has a faint memory of a man and a woman, one telling the other to kill her. She wakes up the next morning alone in the woods, bleeding from the face and suffering from an urgent thirst—for blood. She’s approached by one of her attackers, a century-old vampire (or “Risen,” as they prefer) named Jae. Jae can finally provide Ava with information about her long-lost family, but it isn’t necessarily news she wants to hear. It turns out that Ava is the last surviving member of the Line, the ruling dynasty of the Risen in Europe known for their violence and cruelty. It’s hardly the sort of family Ava would have imagined for herself. But is a bad family better than no family at all? Viola’s urgent prose keeps the reader rooted in each wonderfully claustrophobic scene (even if she sometimes takes a bit too long to explain things). The premise is a familiar one at this point, a fact that the author winks at here when Jae is disappointed by Ava’s ability to self-diagnose her own vampirism. “I’m so surprised at humans these days,” he grumbles. “Television and film, not to mention the bestsellers, have desensitized them to the real horrors of the supernatural, making the reality of the situation far too easy to accept.” There isn’t much to Ava’s story that is new, but those who love vampire fiction will enjoy this new series.

A taut, Germany-set addition to the vampire genre.