Hell's Warrior

"Ms. Roycraft has a very definite gift for grabbing the reader 'by the throat,' and holding on through the entire book." --Irene Marshall, Escape to Romance

Sex has never been so deadly for one of the undead . . .

It's been twenty years since the vampire-mortal war known to the undead as "Hell" ended, but peace has been hard for Chicago's doyen, vampire Che Kincade. Beauty and power ensure that blood, sex, and money come easily, but compromises and concessions are hard for a half-breed undead warrior whose roots run centuries deep in violence. Still, he's managed at last to make peace bearable.

A secret affair with his mortal counterpart, Chicago Mayor Deborah Dayton, ensures that their weekly meetings at city hall to discuss the vampire problems in the city are accompanied by wonderfully delicious clandestine sex. But Cade's house-of-cards peace tumbles when, just hours after their usual tryst, news comes that a high-profile murder has taken place in the city. Soon Cade's very private and ordered world unravels when he's wanted for murder.

He goes on the run with no help but Red, a blood whore whose bed he's in when the call comes that the Chicago PD has a warrant for his arrest. The frame puts a whole new light on the murder, and Cade tries to make sense of it as he dodges the police, mob assassins, and the vampire hunters known as the Brothers of the Sun. But when the people Cade cares about keep dying, he has no choice but to return to that which he knows best--killing.

Jaye Roycraft, a former big-city police officer in Wisconsin, has incorporated her police procedural knowledge into her stories of the undead, creating urban fantasies that twist together modern realism with history. Jaye, author of ten novels, has presented numerous workshops for writers both online and at conferences, has been a contest judge, and has been a featured panelist at Dragon*Con. Jaye recently moved from the frozen tundra and now lives in sunny Arizona.