This young adult vampire tale is better suited to horror fans. Violet Lee, aged seventeen, is sitting alone in Trafalgar Square even though she knows London is unsafe at one in the morning. She then witnesses a mass murder and the handful of people responsible take her along with them instead of just killing her too. They turn out to be a vampire coven and bring her to a palatial hideaway in Kent. Part of the tale is told by a 'young' male vampire called Kaspar.

I'm not a horror fan so the gory start to the book didn't endear it to me, and the tone was maintained. While I'm keen on urban fantasies, I usually find that after the first few books they stop being adventures and go into multilayered detail about who gives orders to whom, at which point I lose interest. Well, THE DARK HEROINE did that after the first couple of chapters. Violet is the daughter of the Secretary for Defence so the vampires decide to kidnap rather than kill her, though she continually feels menaced and other captives are killed. The British government it seems is well aware of lurking vampires and even has treaties with them, and the coven's ruler gives Violet protection from others. Even so her destroying a stack of condoms belonging to a highly sexed vampire man seems unlikely, if undead need such items that is. There are child vampires and they grow to the age of eighteen - one wonders if they used to grow to twenty-one. There are also half vampires, or dhampirs, and when Violet is sexually assaulted in a violent attack that leaves her half dead, she is given vampire blood to turn her into a dhampir in order to save her. The hope of the coven leader is that she will voluntarily choose to become a vampire if left with them long enough, Stockholm syndrome not being named but clearly the aim.

Between strong language and the violence and adult content, I would give a parental advisory; this is not 'Twilight'. Abigail Gibbs has clearly spent a lot of time rethinking the vampire myth and correctly impresses on us that yes, they are predators and teenage girls should stop thinking hopelessly romantic thoughts about violent older men. Adult horror fans, however, may love it.