This gory horror-thriller opens immediately after book one in the Vampire Federation series, Uprising. Detective Joel Solomon is less than pleased to wake up and find he has become one of his hated enemies, a vampire.

Vampire Federation Agent Alex Bishop knows it is only a matter of time until Joel's instincts leads him to her, his sire, and she is performing a very delicate balancing act between her duties to the Federation and her disgust for the level of incompetence she glimpsed while fighting to protect her superiors.

In the meantime, the Ubervampyr race is upping the stakes, enlisting the eager aid of a cannibalistic serial killer by offering him the reward of turning him, as long as he can retrieve the Cross of Ardaich, while various well-defined characters with smaller roles are in danger's way with about as much combined survival skill as an escaped Easter bunny. McCabe has plenty of skill to carry off the complex, Byzantine plotlines and high number of important but low- profile characters. Readers who don't mind their thrillers with a (very) high level of violence accompanied by buckets of gore will enjoy THE CROSS a great deal. If you are looking for a more sedate paranormal thriller however, be warned. The level of violence slides the book solidly into the horror genre in my opinion.