God Save The Queen

Xandra Vardan serves in the Royal Guard of an alternate Britain in the year 2012, where Queen Victoria still rules as an undead matriarch. Her duty is to protect the Aristocracy, whose members are werewolves and vampires.

Then her sister goes missing. Xandra's search for her leads down a path that unsettles what she has always believed about the order she serves. It also uncovers a conspiracy with the power to bring the empire down, and Xandra herself turns out to be the key to it, the prize in a dangerous struggle.

The setting is urban fantasy with a steampunk streak, in which technology and magic coexist. Nobility comes from infection with the Plague, and undeath is one of its side-effects. Hysteria is the common affliction of the day, leeches are eaten as a delicacy, and goblins live underground. Mothers keep their children indoors after dark.

The tone mixes dark menace with a wry sense of humor about its own odd world. The pace follows a missing-person search that grows into a larger political threat, with a female guard at the center.