Bloodline Secrets – Paperback

A black rose. A one-way ticket. A vampire Prince who has sworn not to lie.

Clara Ashworth has spent a month learning that London hides a second city beneath its streets. Now a letter from a stranger who claims to have known her mother sends her across the Atlantic, with a loyal young Warden and one very small candle-sprite hidden in her coat, to the Hudson Street Court of New York, where two hundred of the dead keep old grudges and impeccable manners.

The rules are simple. Hospitality lasts three nights. Everything has a price. An apology is a debt. And somewhere in this house is the truth about what happened to Clara’s mother on Hampstead Heath, and a name for what Clara really is.

But the Court has a war of its own brewing. The ancient Baroness Szabo is certain the Prince murdered her only son, and she calls for a Weighing: a trial under the oldest law of the hidden world, where a Scale must stand before the whole Court and tell truth from lie. If Clara cannot do it, she is a fraud, and so is the Prince’s Court. If she can, she must judge a man who may be the only living witness to her family’s past.

Before the trial, the Baroness’s day-men come for her in broad daylight, and the secrets she came for are buried in an archive beneath the New York Public Library.

BLOODLINE SECRETS is a fast-paced urban fantasy mystery of vampire court politics, ancient bloodlines and hard truths, with more heart than romance. Book Three of The Banned Arbiter Chronicles, best read after The First Spark and Shadow Alley.

The truth is not a gift. It is a price.