How to Hunt Vampires: A Practical Guide for the Perpetually Unwise

Everything you know about killing vampires is wrong, and the vampire who wrote this book would take it as a courtesy if you'd stop getting people killed with it.

Bernie is roughly seven hundred years old, extremely tired, and reluctantly the world's leading authority on the many things you believe about vampires that are going to get you killed. Garlic does not repel him; it seasons him. Running water does not stop him; it merely ruins a very good coat. The threshold, the mirror, the cross, the scattered seeds you were told to count — all of it is decoration, sold to you across six centuries by creatures who would much prefer your defenses theatrical and your front door open. So he has written it all down. Accurately. With star ratings. Against the express wishes of the committee that ordered it.

Which is the trouble, because the committee is the Vampire Council, and the Council has put him on trial. The charges are three: publishing the book, disclosing what the book discloses, and the deaths of eleven of his own kind. Bernie would like it noted that he did not kill them. He would also like to know who did — because someone is working through the quiet ones, the gentle ones, the vampires with no following and no enemies, in a careful and patient order, and the order looks a great deal like a list he has seen before.

The deeper into his own manual he reads, the clearer it becomes that the field guide and the murders are the same document, and that the most dangerous thing in any room was never the monster in the cape. It was the calm one who has already done the arithmetic, is in no hurry at all, and would be glad to make you a cup of tea. Bernie has spent seven hundred years being that calm one. He is about to meet someone better at it than he is.

He set out to write a book that would keep his kind safe by keeping you frightened and wrong. He is going to finish it as the truest thing he has ever done — and the only weapon in all these pages that has ever actually worked is the one he can't quite make himself put on the record.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Deadpan, dust-dry narrators who never try to be funny — the accuracy is the joke
• Monster mythology turned inside out: the mundane, bureaucratic, weirdly worse truth behind every legend
• A grumpy, ancient, exhausted immortal with a heart he refuses under oath to admit he has
• A slow-burn mystery hidden inside a comic "how-to," with a killer who murders by patience and paperwork
• Warm found-family and aching loneliness sitting quietly beneath the jokes

How to Hunt Vampires is a standalone novel.