Vesper Glen – review

Author: Coryn Noble

First Published: 2025

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Charlie Pike, a detective with the Boston Police Department, gets a call from his hometown in Vermont, asking if he wants to be their new police chief. It’s an appealing offer, but it would mean telling his wife Abbie, and eventually their kids Natalie and Marcus, about the “V’s” – the hundred or so residents of Vesper Glen with symbionts that make them live for centuries, heal rapidly from wounds, avoid sunlight and garlic, and regularly need to consume blood.

Even after Abbie overcomes her initial skepticism, and Charlie takes the job, she’s still apprehensive about her new neighbors, including leading citizen John Saxon, town doctor Meara Desmond, and night-shift Sergeant Ray Dante. Still, the family settles into small town life, sharing the ancestral Pike house with Charlie’s elderly dad.

Then a run-in with a biker gang gets the attention of an FBI agent, a hostile Army officer, a marauding band of V’s whose leader holds a grudge against John, and a secret society of fanatical vampire hunters. All of this will test the ingenuity and determination of the entire community…

The review: I think the first thing to note about Vesper Glen is the source of the vampirism. As the blurb mentions, the vampires are in a symbiotic relationship with a lifeform that has taken residence within their veins, living off the iron in blood and forcing the need to drink blood to feed the symbiote. In return it heals them and slows aging. A subterranean lifeform, it is highly sensitive to UV light. As such, these are living vampires and, as the novel progresses, they are split into factions – those in Vesper Glen believe in living side by side with humans, the most extreme believe that humans are foodstuff only and they are superior.

The book sees cop Charlie Pike take on role of police chief, already knowing about the Vs as he grew up in Vesper Glen (and kids are told the truth of some of the townsfolk at 15). Charlie’s wife and kids, however, are in the dark and he has to convince Abbie that living next door to vampires is not a dangerous thing. The reader soon discovers it is dangerous, however, not due to their vampires but down to general bad guys (in the form of a biker gang), a band of vampires from the extreme faction and the Hawthorn Cross – a shadowy secret vampire killing society.

The writing in this was crisp and perhaps veered over towards the utilitarian in places, but as this is told from Charlie’s point of view that felt right, given his cop pedigree. The book lies more towards police procedural than urban fantasy – though that element still sits there. We do get to hear quite a lot about the vampires’ society, including their own language, but there is much more than could and should be explored in future volumes. A neat little read, with some interesting takes on the genre. 7 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK