The Works of Tim Powers

Tim sent along this summary of his new novel. It may be called Hide Me Among the Graves or Blood Between Us. HarperCollins has scheduled the book for next year.

In the winter of 1862, London veterinarian John Crawford learns that his interlude with a prostitute seven years earlier has produced a daughter. The now-reformed ex-prostitute, Adelaide McKee, has recently learned that their lost daughter is still alive—but that the girl's life and soul are in peril from a vampiric ghost whose murderous attention McKee drew in her bad old days.

The vampire ghost is John Polidori, Lord Byron's one-time physician and uncle to the poet Christina Rossetti and her brother, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, both of whose works are supernaturally aided by the influence of Polidori. But when Polidori horribly makes a resurrected vampire of Dante's wife, and threatens other family members, the Rossettis know that they must find a way to destroy their monstrous uncle, even though it means the end of their best work.

Thrown together with Crawford and McKee, who hope to find and save their fugitive daughter, the Rossettis find themselves plunged into a supernatural London underworld they never suspected. Each of the mismatched four, and the Artful-Dodger-like daughter too—in the midst of shootings and narrow escapes and supernatural warfare — must ultimately choose between stressful life and the unholy immortality that Polidori offers.

The novel sweeps from high London society to the grimmest slums, from the elegant salons of the West End to the pre-Roman catacombs under St. Paul's cathedral, and ultimately reveals a supernatural revenge plot against England that has been brewing since the queen of the native Iceni was killed by the Roman governor Suetonius in 60 AD.