This Ravenous Fate

Harlem, 1926. Reapers, once-human vampires born of historical atrocities, hunt in the nightclubs after dark. The Saint family runs the business of hunting them, and its influence over the city outweighs that of organized crime.

Eighteen-year-old Elise Saint is the reluctant heir to that empire. She has just come home from five years in Paris when a run of impossible murders begins: reapers are being turned human again. The case pulls her back toward Layla Quinn, the best friend she left behind, who is now a reaper and is being framed for the killings.

The two have to work together. They follow rumors of a cure and a threat that neither the hunters nor the reapers saw coming. The wealth, racism and generational trauma that shaped them both stay close at hand in Harlem's underworld.

This is historical fantasy with a Jazz Age setting, and it is paced slowly and deliberately. It deals frankly with racial injustice and class privilege. At its center is an enemies-to-lovers romance between two young Black women. It is a sapphic slow burn in which trust has to be rebuilt after betrayal and in the middle of danger.

It is the first book of the Ravenous Fate Duology and continues in Our Vicious Descent.