Hide Me Among The Graves by Tim Powers

 

Tim Powers has a few obsessions.  Many of his books center around pirates and vampires and Victorian poets.  There are no pirates in this novel but there are vampires and poets.  Adelaide McKee, a former prostitute, and John Crawford, a veterinarian, meet on a bridge in London where they are attacked by a spirit.  They escape by jumping into the river below and their night together ends up producing a daughter.  The next time Crawford sees Adelaide, she tells him about his daughter and that she had thought she was dead but had recently heard that she was alive and now McKee needs Crawford's help to rescue their daughter.

The spirit that tried to capture them that night was John Polidori, a vampire.  He is also the uncle of poets Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  They have known about their uncle and have tried to subdue him since Christina was fourteen.  Now they are willing to join the fight to extinguish all the vampires in London.  Along with Polidori is the vampire Boudica who had been a Celtic queen who fought against Roman rule in London.  She and Polidori want to create an earthquake to destroy London.  To do so, they want McKee and Crawford's daughter to marry the miscarried baby of Gabriel.  They are also aided by Edward John Trelawny a man who helped poets Bryon and Shelley in their fight against vampires.

Tim Powers is famous in the fantasy genre.  One of his books was the inspiration for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  His books are like a rollercoaster, full of intrigue and power plays, violence and love.  This book is recommended for fantasy readers.