Description: From Bram Stoker's Dracula to Anne Rice's Lestat, vampires have fascinated generations of readers around the globe. This sophisticated new novel by Danish writer Hanna Lutzen introduces Prince Vlad Tepes -- the original Dracula -- in a startlingly different love story. Vlad is an engrossing tale that skillfully weaves its historical background and literary ancestors into an imaginative and contemporary horror story as well.

When Wilhelm Moerck returns to his apartment after being away for some time, he finds it empty, stripped of all his possessions. Furthermore, his niece Lucia, a Danish medical student who has been living there in his absence, is nowhere to be found. The only thing left is a collection of old documents describing the last voyage of a ship, the Demeter, in 1894 and Lucia's diary. Together, the papers tell an incredible story of the ship, its Romanian captain, and a mysterious passenger, Vlad, whose only baggage is a large number of coffins filled with dirt. As for Lucia, when she reads the strange story written down by her great grandfather, an English doctor who cared for the captain of the Demeter when it landed in England, she finds herself emotionally drawn toward Vlad. Soon the lines between reality and fantasy become increasingly blurred.

Like Lucia, the reader is plunged into the sights and smells of the dark and often cruel world of the Middle Ages, when the real-life Prince Vlad Dracula of Romania fought against Islamic expansionism on behalf of his own people and all of Christian Europe. And like Lucia, readers prepare themselves for the inevitable and chilling climax -- the union with Vlad -- with equal parts dread and excitement

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