A fearless young heroine ventures into a Parisian underworld court of conspiring vampires in this sweeping alternate history.
The vampire King Louis XIV reigns supreme over a terrorized France, determined to protect his empire at any cost. When a mysterious renegade vampire named the Lady of Miracles ascends to power in an underworld Parisian court and claims the city for herself, Louis feels threatened for the first time in centuries.
His secret weapon to fight back? Mademoiselle Diane de Gastefriche, a young baronette who earned the king’s trust through her own cunning and wit. He sends Diane to squash the new threat to his power. But King Louis has no idea that this feisty girl’s real name is Jeanne Froidelac: she is an infiltrated commoner, whose secret mission is to destroy him and rid the world of the vampiric tyranny.
Caught between a vengeful king and a ruthless rival, Jeanne embarks on a quest that could alter the kingdom’s destiny—and expose a powerful secret that she will do anything to protect.
The series
In the world of Vampyria, the Sun King never died. In 1715, Louis XIV chose immortality instead, transforming himself into a vampire and condemning Europe to an eternal age of darkness. Three centuries later, Versailles still glitters, the aristocracy still rules, and ordinary mortals pay a blood tax to sustain the undead elite.
Read full series description
At the center of Victor Dixen's dark alternate history is Jeanne Froidelac, a young commoner whose family is destroyed by the king's forces. With little left except her anger and a dangerous secret, Jeanne assumes the identity of a noblewoman and enters the world of Versailles. Her purpose is not to join the immortal court but to survive it long enough to strike at the ruler who created it.
That deception places her inside a society built on blood, privilege, and appearances. The palace remains dazzling on the surface, filled with elaborate etiquette, extravagant fashions, rivalries, and ambition, but beneath its golden halls lies a brutal order in which vampires occupy the highest ranks and humans exist largely to serve them. Every step Jeanne takes deeper into court brings opportunity, but also the possibility that someone will discover who she really is.
The series gradually pushes beyond Versailles into the hidden corners of Paris and eventually across the Atlantic, widening its vision of a world whose history has been frozen by immortal rulers. Secret societies, alchemy, rebellion, piracy, forbidden magic, and rival supernatural powers complicate Jeanne's original desire for revenge as she discovers that bringing down the vampire monarchy may demand more than simply reaching the king.
Dixen draws heavily on the imagery of Louis XIV's France while twisting it into Gothic fantasy. The result combines vampire horror and alternate history with court intrigue, adventure, romance, and the extravagant atmosphere of the Baroque era. Familiar historical institutions become sinister reflections of themselves: aristocratic privilege is made literal through immortality, political power is maintained through blood, and Versailles becomes both a magnificent palace and a carefully decorated cage.
Jeanne's double identity gives the Vampyria Saga much of its tension. She must learn to move among the very creatures she hates, wearing the manners and appearance of an aristocrat while secretly working against the society she appears desperate to join. As that disguise becomes harder to separate from the person beneath it, her struggle grows into something larger than revenge, a battle over freedom, identity, and who has the right to shape the future of a world that has been trapped in the past for three hundred years.
Be the first reviewer
Sign in and write the first reader review.
