Darius - a Vampire Story

Book excerpt: John-Luke is a quiet intellectual who passed almost unnoticed through high school and college. He has signed up for what he believes will be a quiet period of discernment at a monastery but runs into what he thinks is a vampiress, which he doesn't believe in, and then into the beautiful and distracting Genevieve. His life goes sideways. Genevieve and Ciara Regan are being 'fixed up' by their wealthy, blue-blooded socialite mother who always has some kind of a matchmaking scheme brewing for one or both of them. Ciara has learned to be 'quietly uncooperative' but her sister Genevieve is more rebellious. While dodging her mother's choices, the outgoing and vivacious Genevieve has her own covert husband-capturing scheme going on, and Ciara -- well, she loses hope that love is ever coming for her. Darius Luca Lazarescu, a local mortician and owner of the Belmont Funeral Home and Cemetery Properties, is a vampire who has, over a few lifetimes, devised a workable survival plan where he feeds from two to three girls, no one gets hurt, no new vampiresses are created and Darius remains under the radar at his funeral home and cemetery business. Unfortunately, his dark vices get the better of him and he occasionally drinks too much, 'feeds' too much and loses one of his women, and that's when things really go upside down -- for all of them, including the mafia-hired private investigator who is looking for Big Sal Luciano's daughter daughter who was last seen with Darius.