The Catacombs That Breathe In Naples – Paperback

In Naples, the adopted dead rest because the living gave them names. Somebody is filing the names off.

Forensic anthropologist Dr Viola Ferrante, thirty-three, keeps the humidity logs for the great ossuary under the Rione Sanit, where for two hundred years the quarter’s anonymous dead have been adopted – chosen, named, tagged in brass, and prayed for by name. This August her instruments record the impossible: the hill has drawn one long breath in, and held it for nineteen days. Fifty-one adopted skulls now wear bright blank tags where their names used to be, and a glossy events company is preparing to argue, in a warm room in Rome, that remains nobody can name are merely archaeological material – movable, licensable, and perfect for an immersive evening attraction.

The hill keeps its census in its lungs. Un-name its dead, and it will go looking for their addresses through the bedrooms of the quarter above. The only things standing between Naples and a very bad All Souls are the breath-book Viola’s great-grandmother kept until 1961 – and the ossuary’s night custodian. Gennaro Esposito has been on the payroll since before the payroll. A foundling of the Annunziata wheel, he lent the hill his own name in the plague year 1656 so the un-named dead could be delivered to it, and he has been its address of record, and its borrowed lungs, ever since. Rule the First, in barbed-wire handwriting: read no name aloud below the third gallery. Down there, everything that hears its name inhales.

To give the hill back its census by All Souls, Viola must re-stitch sixty names in cloth a file cannot argue with, out-paperwork a franchise of undertakers of endings – and ask a man who has been other people’s address for 374 years to do the most dangerous thing in Naples: choose his own name, entire, above ground, in his own mouth first.

Three-hundred-year-old vampire custodian hero. Forced proximity in a breathing catacomb. He falls first – he has been setting the table for her family’s answers since the plague. A heroine who counts the breaths twice.

The Catacombs That Breathe In Naples is a spicy gothic vampire horror romance for adults: open-door, fully consensual, with a guaranteed happily-ever-after and a city that refuses to leave its dead anonymous. Book Four of Blood & Vines, after Bound to the Vampire of Villa Gente, The Palazzo That Drowns At Dawn, and The Saint’s Heart of Palermo. Each book is a standalone love story threaded through one old Italian Bargain.