The Last Rite
Russia - 1917. Zmyeevich, king of all vampires, is dead.
History records that the great voordalak - known across Europe as Dracula - perished in 1893 beneath the ramparts of his own castle, deep in the mountains of Wallachia. In Russia, the Romanov tsars are free of the curse that has plagued their blood for two centuries.
But two decades later and Tsar Nicholas II faces a new threat - a threat from his own people. War has brought Russia to her knees and the people are hungry for change. Revolution is in the air.
Mihail Konstantinovich Danilov - who himself carries Romanov blood - welcomes the prospect of a new regime. Like his ancestors he once fought to save the Romanovs from the threat that Zmyeevich brought them. Fought and won. But now he sees no future for a Russia ruled by a tyrant. He is joined in the struggle by his uncle, Dmitry Alekseevich - a creature born in a different era, over a century before. For more than half his existence he has been a vampire, and yet he still harbours one very human desire; that his country should be free.
But the curse that infects the blood of the Romanovs cannot be so easily forgotten and Mihail soon discovers that it - that he - may become the means by which a terror once thought eradicated might be resurrected...
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Jasper Kent
Jasper Kent was born in Worcestershire, England in 1968. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and went on to study Natural Sciences at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, specialising in physics.
Jasper has spent almost twenty years working as a software engineer in the UK and in Europe, whilst also working on writing both fiction and music. In that time, he has produced the novels Twelve, Yours Etc., Mr Sunday and Sifr, as well as co-writing several musicals, including The Promised Land and Remember! Remember!
He currently lives in Brighton, with six rats called Rose, Manjula, Lurleen, Bertie, Dodo and Alecto, and a person called Helen.
The Danilov Quintet
It is a story that begins in 1812, in what seems Russia's
darkest hour. Yet in the midst of Napoleon's invasion, a new and
terrifying danger emerges, one which will haunt the Danilov family
across generations - just as it already has a far more prestigious
Russian family. It will end a hundred and five years later - as the dynasty of the
Tsars itself comes to an end - when the last of the Danilovs finally
confronts the horror that his ancestor invited into the country, so many years before.
The Danilov Quintet consists of five books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
