A vampire hunter goes undercover at a mysterious university—and finds herself falling in love with her roommate, an alluring vampire, in book one of a seductive sapphic paranormal fantasy.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Annie Summerlee’s The Book of Blood and Roses, which releases on January 13th 2026.
“Then her red eyes are on mine, gentle, deadly. . . . She takes her time, kissing my neck. . . . I pull her closer, and I say, Bite me.”
In the mists of the Scottish Highlands is a university where vampires study alongside humans.
Rebecca Charity is a vampire hunter undercover at the university, searching for the mysterious Book of Blood and Roses, a lost compendium of ways to kill vampires. If she finds it, she’ll be one step closer to avenging her parents, who were slain by those creatures of the night.
But when Rebecca arrives, she finds something unexpected: a coffin. Her new roommate is Aliz Astra, scion of one of the most powerful vampire families . . . and the most beautiful woman Rebecca has ever met.
The maddeningly gorgeous Aliz is everything that Rebecca has always hated but also everything she’s ever wanted, and now Rebecca doesn’t know if she wants to kiss or kill her.
When one moonlit night Aliz rescues her from a vampire attack, she accidentally makes Rebecca her Familiar. Now they must work together to break the curse—but as they get closer to solving the mystery, Rebecca and Aliz get closer, too.
Can a vampire hunter ever fall in love with a vampire?
EXCERPT
A bouquet of roses, lying upon a mahogany coffin, hides the stench of death. Tall, misshapen candles decorate every corner of the room. I stare at their flames, white and blue, while the vampire rummages through an old chest of drawers.
She turns to lock her crimson eyes with mine. “Don’t move yet, darling,” she says.
“I won’t.” My voice is listless. Entranced. Her red eyes give her the ability to twist a human’s will however she pleases. When she first saw me at the party downstairs and caught my scent, she wasted no time in making me follow her, as though she was in a rush. As though she won’t live forever.
Her room’s décor is the opposite of the downstairs club’s. Dame Danger is an industrial mess, all pipes and neon lights. But here the room has thick velvet curtains, a red Persian rug over a wooden floor. She doesn’t hide her vanity: Framed portraits of herself fill every wall. Her striking features, chestnut hair, and thick red lips, un-changed through centuries, appear on each canvas. “Ah!” she says. “Finally.” She draws out a dagger. A golden blade with a crystal hilt embedded with flowers. “Now we can begin.”
I stare at the weapon, my heart pounding.
“Begin what?” I whisper.
My back is pressed against the wall. I stand exactly where she told me to— in the very same spot, I imagine, as all her past victims. She closes the distance between us and places the cold crystal in my hands, drawing my fingers tight around the hilt. Then she leans down, presses her nose into the crook of my neck, and inhales. “Delicious,” she whispers.
My blood, Type-S, is extremely rare, only one in ten thousand humans are said to have it. And with its scent alone, it can make a satiated vampire thirsty again.
My fingers tremble around the dagger. I know what comes next. I know what happened to her previous victims. She leans back just enough for her red eyes to meet mine again, and they glow bright before she commands: “Slit your throat.”
I lift the blade to my neck, and her pupils dilate. Her lips part. She has fangs, razor sharp, but she doesn’t want to use them. Perhaps this is her MO: Instead of biting and sucking from small puncture wounds, as most vampires do, this one wants me to slit my own throat and provide her with a heavy flow of blood so she can gorge without tiring herself.
Police sirens fill the street below. They’re too far away. No one will hear me if I scream.
Luckily enough, I don’t need to.
“I’d rather not,” I say.
She’s frozen, bent to drink from the wound I’ve yet to open. She stares up at me, confused. “What?”
“But thanks for the dagger,” I say, my trembling hands relaxing. I slice just beneath her chin and the blade hits bone. She clasps her neck, speechless as blood sprays from the gash. I kick her, and the same smile she used on me when she assumed I was easy prey appears on my lips now.
If she was a Heritage vampire, the kind of vampire who is born instead of made, her open neck might heal in a matter of minutes. But as a Convert, someone who used to be human, it’ll take days.
At a first glance it can be hard to tell what kind of vampire you’re facing, because they look identical except for the fact that all Heritage vampires stop aging when they turn thirty, while Converts are frozen at whatever age they were sired. Dame Danger here doesn’t look a day over twenty.
“Callisto sends its regards,” I say, before sliding out the weapon hidden in the bustier of my dress. A slit throat won’t kill a vampire, but a stake most certainly will. I slam it through her chest, hearing ribs crack before it pierces her rotten heart.
Like all vampires, she leaves no corpse behind. Just smoke and dust.
I stretch my arms above my head. A low buzz fills my right ear after I tap on my silver earring. “You really expect me to believe she was dangerous?” I say.
“Just get out of there,” Penny, my supervisor, replies.
I blow out the candles and pull open the velvet curtains. A full moon hangs above London’s jagged skyline. The window opens with a creak as the old Victorian building protests at my strength. Wind blows my short black hair, and I jump out. “Seriously, these missions are getting too easy,” I say. I know I shouldn’t complain. But hopefully Penny will get the hint. Understand that I’m ready.
Ready for her to tell me the truth.
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Excerpted from The Book of Blood and Roses by Annie Summerlee. Copyright © 2026 by Ana Gil Boyle. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
