Fangs & First Impressions

Synopsis

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a gentleman of considerable fortune and foreign extraction must be concealing something — though perhaps no one suspects quite how much. When the ancient vampire lord Aleksandr Vordescu arrives in the sleepy county of Meryton, purchasing the long-shuttered Thornfield Abbey and presenting himself as a Transylvanian nobleman of impeccable taste and unknowable age, the neighbourhood erupts with speculation. Mrs. Hartwell immediately declares him a fine catch for one of her five daughters. The local militia finds him unsettling but cannot say precisely why. And Cecilia Hartwell, the second daughter — sharp-tongued, observant, and constitutionally resistant to flattery — notices that he casts no shadow at the Meryton assembly ball and has not once touched his supper. Vordescu, who has survived crusades, plagues, and the fall of empires, finds himself entirely unprepared for a woman who meets his most carefully cultivated air of Gothic menace with a raised eyebrow and a cutting remark. As the winter social season unfolds through balls, morning calls, and catastrophically mismanaged card parties, Cecilia unravels his secret layer by layer, while Vordescu — for the first time in four centuries — finds himself genuinely altered by another person's good opinion. But an older enemy has followed him from the Continent: a vampire hunter of the Van Drecht family, who does not intend to let the creature rest quietly among the gentry. Cecilia must decide whether the man she has come to love is redeemable, and Vordescu must confront whether a being of darkness can, at last, choose the light — before the drawing rooms of Regency England become a battlefield between the ancient world and the new.