In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—in truth, a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons.
Kovatcheva excels at building atmosphere and depicting rising tensions, and that will be enough for many readers, but there is less satisfaction to be found in what the novel has to say about the world — either the one we find in the book or our own — than the best of the genre can offer.
