The Golden

Winner of the Locus Award. In the mid nineteenth century, vampires gather at Castle Banat, one of their most sprawling and ancient warrens. Their five-hundred-year breeding project has produced the Golden, a mortal of perfect blood, and they've come to drink from her in a ceremony that will incidentally make her one of the Family. When the girl is found murdered, the clan’s shadowy patriarch calls on the detective Michel Beheim to solve the crime. But Michel has been a vampire for only a short while, and though he was a talented investigator among mortals, he is ill-prepared for the task. Soon he is fighting to survive the bizarre terrors of the labyrinthine castle and the schemes of vampires who guard a secret that may forever alter the world of the undead. From Publishers Weekly Nebula and World Fantasy award winner Shepard ( Kalimantan, The Ends of the Earth ) here enters the current vampire novel sweepstakes, breathing new life into some shopworn conventions with flowing, seductive prose and lush imagery. Young vampire Michel Beheim comes to the Castle Banat in Eastern Europe with his mentor, Lord Roland Agenor, for the ritual Decanting, at which the extended vampire Family will share in the rare blood of the specially bred victim called the Golden. But when the Golden is brutally murdered before the event, Agenor puts Beheim, once chief of detectives for the Paris police, in charge of the investigation. Soon the young vampire is embroiled in family intrigues and facing the fearsome Patriarch of the vampires himself. Beheim's investigation becomes an odyssey of personal growth as he confronts his vampire nature with all its internal conflicts, including his uncertain feelings for his human servant, Giselle, and his growing love for a lovely vampire, Lady Alexandra Conforti, whom he cannot bring himself to trust. Shepard adds a wild, phantasmagoric element to his vampire lore through the sprawling mystery of Castle Banat, and through his focus on vampires interacting among themselves rather than roaming the world of mortals as do the caped counts and modern nightclub stalkers who crowd most nosferatu novels. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review Shepard's new venture is a seamless blend of police procedural, gothic romance, and vampire yarn. The time period is circa 1860, and the old world settings, rich with fabulist overtones, are given a nice dusty feel by Shepard's skillfull utilization narrative techniques associated with nineteenth-century fiction. Michel Beheim, once a Parisian police prefect, has survived a vampire bite (with the usual consequences) and has subsequently been inducted into the Family, a secret society of the immortal creatures whose dark history dates back thousands of years. Beheim is called upon to resurrect his skills and ferret out a murderer whose crime, the unauthorized "decanting" of the blood of a ceremonial victim, threatens the Family's fragile balance of power. Shepard's understated eroticism and his interspersed polemics on the "inhuman" condition add flair and substance to this remarkable book. --Elliott Swanson, BookList Few works of vampire fiction refresh their exhausted, clichéd subject. But The Golden imparts vibrant energy to the old corpse.... The Golden is, however implausibly, an original vampire novel. -- Parsec Shepard adds a wild, phantasmagoric element to his vampire lore through the sprawling mystery of Castle Banat, and through his focus on vampires interacting among themselves rather than roaming the world of mortals as do the caped counts and modern nightclub stalkers who crowd most nosferatu novels. -- Publishers Weekly In the mid-nineteenth century, vampires gather at Castle Banat, one of their most sprawling and ancient warrens. Their five-hundred-year breeding project has produced the Golden, a mortal of perfect blood, and they've come to drink from her in a ceremony that will incidentally make her one of the Family. When the girl is found murdered, the clan’s shadowy patriarch calls on the detective Michel Beheim to solve the crime. But Michel has been a vampire for only a short while, and though he was a talented investigator among mortals, he is ill prepared for the task. Soon he is fighting to survive the bizarre terrors of the labyrinthine castle and the schemes of vampires who guard a secret that may forever alter the world of the undead.