Bloodshade

In a world where the night belongs to undead creatures known as the draugr, and mankind is forced to cremate the bodies of their own in order to prevent their turning as well, the life of Karik, a young legionnaire, is about to be forever changed when the person closest to him in the world is slain by a draugr unlike any seen before-one behaving with conscious thought and seemingly cruel intention.

Even as the devastating loss of his friend leaves Karik on his own for the first time in his life, he and his people are forced to rethink everything they've long held to be true about their nocturnal adversaries, and then take action. Karik is sent on a perilous journey to find the Morahl, an elusive clan of draugr hunters who just might have the answers he needs to help save his people from a creature long believed to exist only in the pages of childhood storybooks: a master draugr, pulling the strings of all the rest in pursuit of some sinister agenda.

With the fate of his people weighing heavily on his shoulders and time running out, for Karik, only a single question remained: Would he truly find the answers he sought, allowing his people to put an end to this new threat ... or would that threat end him?

A graphic designer for more than twenty years, author Matthew Riopel has always been an avid reader and writer, but having been on the front lines of the "zombiepocolypse" himself, it was perhaps only natural that his first published novel, Bloodshade-book one of the Path of Shadows series-be set in just such a world, offering a fresh take on a classic genre.

Riopel currently lives in Montreal, where he is hard at work on book number two.