The Blood Court of Blackvale by Laurie Bowler

An ancient house. Vampire secrets. A man determined to expose them all.Blackvale Manor rises at the edge of civilisation, home to an order of vampires that has hidden in plain sight for centuries. Henry Vale, the vampire lord who commands them, has built an empire on secrecy, carefully controlled feeding, sealed wards, and absolute silence. But that silence is fracturing.When an ambitious vampire deliberately opens the manor’s hidden protections, something ancient awakens beneath the house: a threshold intelligence that feeds on grief and maternal rage. It spreads through London like dark water, manifesting at doorways and mirrors, leaving bodies with impossible wounds. The vampire secret, the existence of Henry’s kind, is days away from public exposure.Enter Elias Thorne, an investigator obsessed with documenting the world’s most dangerous secrets. He has spent years collecting evidence of vampiric activity across England, and now he’s been summoned directly to Blackvale. Henry Vale wants to control the narrative before Elias exposes everything. But Elias has tasted the truth, and he won’t be bought off or convinced to stay silent.What unfolds is a desperate negotiation between a vampire lord trying to preserve his species’ survival and a mortal man driven by the conviction that such secrets cannot, and should not, be kept. As the boundary between the vampire world and humanity crumbles, both must choose what price they’re willing to pay.A gothic thriller of seduction, secrets, and the dangerous arithmetic of exposure.Fans of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and gothic vampire fiction will love this dark, haunting novel of ancient secrets and the price of survival.