Blood Rising

Blood Rising continues Markus Redmond's Blood Saga, a blend of supernatural horror and alternate history centered on a vengeful vampire tribe formed of formerly enslaved Africans waging war across the antebellum South. Kwadzo Okoro has risen to lead the Ramanga Tribe after seizing the Barrow plantation and freeing its enslaved population, reclaiming the land as the Crimson Plantation and building an uneasy alliance between the Ramangans and Native American allies.

That fragile new order comes under threat from multiple directions: the influential slaveholders Bartholomew and Constance Crabtree work to rally the surrounding community into striking back, while Penelope Knudsen, who has developed the unnatural ability to withstand sunlight, builds a white vampire army of her own. Redmond keeps the series' central conceit, vampirism as a weapon turned back on the system of slavery that created it, at the center of a story that is as much about the fragility of hard-won liberation as it is about supernatural war.