Blood Herring – review

Author: E H Drake

First Published: 2023

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Enjoy this fast paced mystery with an all new spin to vampire lore.

Why did the vampires hide for so long?

It's been three years since the massacres and Detective Gabriel Collins still doesn't know the answer. They took everything from him and he'll never know why. Until finally, Gabe has his chance. A real vampire murder, a chance to put one of the blood suckers away. But when a vampire saves his life, Gabe doesn't know what to think.

How can he work with one of the monsters responsible for all his suffering?

Lily just wants to know why a vampire drug is flooding Portland. The last thing she needs is to cross paths with the police. But when her identity is exposed to the vampire detective, she's forced to keep her enemy closer.

Will they be able to save their city or will their own biases ruin everything?

The review: This is a first book in a series, with a feel of urban fantasy, though the only supernaturals we meet are vampires. Set in a world where three years before there was, suddenly, a series of massacres when vampires announced their existence by slaughtering people (the Portland massacre being an attack on a mall). This has changed the face of the world. Police forces have set up Vampire Police Bureaus in the force to hunt down vampires and all vampire related entertainment, be that films or books, have been banned.

The cops have little to go on, however, everything the humans know is muddied by the tropes from media. For instance, Gabe (one of the two main characters and VPB detective) believes that a stake in the heart will kill a vampire – but it is actually ineffective. In this world it is the brain that must be destroyed (or severed from the body, one assumes). Rather they find themselves dealing with vampire wannabes and copycats, sometimes seizing contraband media, Renfields (those humans pledged to a vampire and given vampire blood) and, mostly, human killers disguising their murders as vampire kills to try and elude arrest.

What Gabe doesn’t know is that there is a hierarchical society of vampires – the Court, headed by a queen – and it was not the Court that committed the atrocities, rather a rogue group of vampires who believe that they should rule, control and farm the humans. Part of the Court is Lily, a PI and vampire who is sent by the Court to investigate the distribution of Cheri Coke – cocaine cut with vampire blood. This overlaps into a real case Gabe is investigating and they end up crossing paths, she saving his life with her blood, even after she discovered that he is one of the rare humans immune to a vampire’s hypnotic powers. He discovers that the foundation of his beliefs might be wrong – that all vampires are not necessarily evil – and have to re-evaluate where he stands.

The book alternates from a chapter from Gabe’s point of view and then a chapter from Lily’s. The author offers each their own voice, essential as the chapters are first person, and this makes for a good reading experience. The writing, generally, is crisp and the story works well.

Some of the lore we get is that, as mentioned, vampire blood can heal and also makes a person temporarily immune to the vampire mind control, adding years to their lifespan, but there has to be intent involved to turn. A sire and their prodigy have a psychic tether between them that activates when the sire is in danger. Vampires are allergic to silver but the way it works is interesting, they cannot properly metabolise it and so their body tries to break it down but it ends up in the brain, causing seizures and eventually death. Sunlight is a slow methodology to kill a vampire, causing bad sunburn rather than immolation that the vampire’s body heals and thus prolonged exposure uses up energy reserves.

A good, strong start to the series that I can only see being built on. 7.5 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK