Lady of the Night

The Long Country

Amalie is a woman cursed by eternal life—a Vampire who still longs for God. A saga of love, blood, and the agonizing price of redemption in a world that has forgotten both.

Genre: Historical Fiction/Realistic Fantasy
Structure: A book in four parts and one of the saga: “Lady of the Night”
Rights available: World English / Translation / Film & TV
Audience: New Adult, Adult
Word count: 104,000 approx
Timeline: Middle 1800s: Gold Rush
Setting: California
Narrative Perspective: Told in the past tense through three alternating, close third-person perspectives. (Amalie, Jean-Pierre and Nate)

Comparables

Lady is unique, that it's paranormal (Vampire) and historical fiction (Western).
"Interview with a Vampire" meets "Lonesome Dove."

Synopsis

“Lady of the Night” is about Amalie’s torment: a centuries-old vampire who remembers faith more vividly than life, she wanders through brothels, cathedrals, backroom apothecaries searching for something that even immortality can’t give, grace. Her story is one of paradox and yearning: damned by blood, yet reaching for light she cannot touch.

“The Long Country” unfolds during the 1849 California Gold Rush, where three fractured lives collide in the lawless town of Prosperity. Amalie, a mysterious woman who has forgotten who she truly is, begins to recover memories that awaken both danger and destiny. Her return to herself stirs old forces in Prosperity, drawing the town toward a reckoning it doesn’t understand.

Jean-Pierre LaRue, a priest searching for redemption, finds himself torn between forbidden desire and fragile faith as both Amalie and Maeve Callahan pull at the seams of his soul. And Nate Hargrove, a soldier running from the ghosts of his past, discovers that Prosperity is the one place where the truth refuses to stay buried. As their paths intertwine, each must confront what hunts them, their sins, their memories, and the darkness rising in the night.

Teaser

The sun had dipped behind the jagged hills like it was hiding from the world. What little light remained spilled across the horizon in bruised hues, purples, ash, blood-orange. Amalie stood alone at the edge of Prosperity, where the last of the clapboard buildings gave way to tents and tarpaulin lean-tos stitched together with desperation. A place where dreams came to starve in the dirt.
The wind picked up, bringing with it the scent of dust, sweat, and sorrow. Smoke from scattered cookfires danced in the breeze, curling like ghost fingers around the canvas edges of dying hope.
Her hunger stirred again. But it wasn’t the simple thirst she’d known for what seemed like centuries. No, this hunger came with a new ache, one kindled by words. His words. Because it keeps me human, Jean-Pierre had said. That stayed with her.
And what am I? She thought of Silas. Of the sound he made in his final moments, the choking rasp, the panic laced with lust, the way his heart beat faster in her grip. There had been no grace in that act. It had been necessary. But it had also been raw.
Her eyes scanned the outskirts, where the ones too broken for Prosperity proper had made their own circles of survival. Families huddled in worn blankets, men sat listless by embers, some singing low and tuneless, others with hollow eyes staring through time.
No one would miss them, not truly. One less mouth to feed. One more soul lost in the dust.