A future built by the survivors of a pandemic.
In a post-apocalyptic world twenty years after a pandemic wiped out a third of the population, data analyst Jackie Fournier searches for the location where the disease first appeared. The job has personal meaning for her; the pandemic killed her little sister.
A country ruled by a dictator.
When certain factions in the government find out what Jackie's been hired to do, they send assassin Nash Kerns to stop her. If she doesn't stop digging when the project is shut down, he has orders to kill.
A band of vampires with old souls.
The vampires only turn people with old souls, people like Jackie. Vampire Morgan wants to turn her so he can gain freedom from his sire, and he's not above using force.
There's another vampire, one with love and romance on his mind. But before that vampire, Trehern, can bring her into his world, he has to eliminate the threats from the assassin who wants to kill her and the vampire who continues to attack her.
A virus that kills vampires.
Then vampires start dying from a disease that looks eerily like the one from the pandemic. More than that--vampires died during the pandemic itself. Even though no other disease can touch them.
Vampires. Viruses. AIs. Oh, my.
Jackie must stay one step ahead of danger while tracking down not just the source of the pandemic twenty years ago, but the reason the vampires have started dying now. Can she unravel the mysteries before she runs out of time?
Does Jackie want to be a vampire? Will she have a choice?
A Note From the Author
When I started this series, I had read and enjoyed many vampire books and stories. But I didn't considering writing vampire fiction until I was struck by this idea: if vampires exist now, shouldn't they also exist in the future? I joined that with my interest in pandemics, spurred on by my discovery that my great-grandfather died in the flu pandemic in 1918, and Legacy of Blood was born.
In these novels--this one and later books in the series--the disease is spread through blood, making every vampire vulnerable. Post apocalypse, the vampires have had to sequester themselves to make sure their blood supply is secure. Though the vampires are hidden from the public at large, they still have enemies and need to protect themselves.
If you enjoy reading urban fantasy or science fiction thrillers (with some romance thrown in), you might enjoy this book. I certainly enjoyed writing it. The sequel is in the works.
About the Author: Daphne Riordan wrote her first novel at the age of twelve, long-hand. It was the story of a girl who had visions about an apocalypse, and her efforts to save her friends by getting them all to a magical island in the Pacific. Daphne would sit with her friends at lunch in sixth grade and write the story, because they insisted on seeing the next page as soon as possible. Since then, she has written many other stories but never strayed too far from her love of fantastical worlds and scientific explanations. She eventually earned a Master's in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, with her novel Legacy of Blood as her thesis novel. She lives in Minnesota with her cat Katniss.
