Half Past Hell

War is hell, even when you're already dead.

It's been twenty years since the vampire-mortal war nicknamed Hell ended, but underneath the gloss of political correctness and affirmative action, old hatreds die hard, especially in the heart of Chi-No, Wisconsin.

It is here that many of Chicago's young vampires are mysteriously dying the true death. Chi-No police detectives Kilpatrick and Duvall have been assigned to the latest case.

Human John Kilpatrick is not happy at being transferred to the "graveyard shift," and he resents being partnered with a vampire. Master vampire Wulf Duvall isn't thrilled to be working with an ignorant meatball like Kilpatrick, but he's excited to be doing something more important than checking taverns for illegal blood whores. Battling each other is hard enough, but the investigation goes from bad to worse when a mortal makes an assassination attempt on Duvall.

Duvall, scarred by 300 years of betrayal, and Kilpatrick, whose black-and-white world has been turned upside down, race against time to discover the true power behind the conspiracy to destroy the peace that no one seems to want. What time is it? Half Past Hell, midway between life and the grave, peace and war . . . time to kill or die.

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.