The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles Box Set by Michelle Drier @MicheleDrier @SDBookTours #giveaway

The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles Box Set

Books 1-4

by Michelle Drier

Genre: Paranormal Romance

This boxed set includes Books One through Four of the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles: Book One, SNAP: The World Unfolds; Book Two, SNAP: New Talent; Book Three, Plague: A Love Story and Book Four, DANUBE: A Tale of Murder.

Book Two, SNAP: New Talent

In the second book of the SNAP Kandesky vampire series, Maxie Gwenoch, media-savvy editor of the multinational celeb gossip magazine SNAP, is pummeled in Paris and kidnapped in Kiev as the Huszars ramp up the race to oust their centuries-old rivals, the Kandeskys.

SNAP’s owners, the Kandesky family of vampires, built the world’s most popular celeb coverage empire but this isn’t just a business take-over. These powerful vampire families lived with an uneasy peace for four centuries until Maxie came in to boost SNAP’s coverage and started making inroads into the Huszar’s traditional hunting territories.

Although Jean-Louis, Maxie’s lover, vampire and second-in-command of the Kandeskys, tries to keep her safe, Maxie is determined to do things her way, a way that may lose her her job, her love and her life.

This is a new edition. It has been reformatted and contains additional bonus material.

Book Three, Plague: A Love Story

The third book of the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles begins the saga of the family’s start during the chaos of 14th century Hungary. When Stefan’s wife and infant son die in a minor plague outbreak, he has nothing to live for, so Theron’s turning him to a vampire is just a way out of his anguish.

Until he takes over the estate of a merchant, recruits Jean-Louis to teach him business and meets Lady Penelope Kandesky.
Plague returns to Budapest and this time paves the way for Stefan to become Baron Stefan Kandesky, a businessman who builds a trading empire with the help of Jean-Louis and Pen.

Book Four, DANUBE: A Tale of Murder

The Kandesky management trio, Stefan, Jean-Louis and Pen, find themselves embroiled in a war with their rivals, the Huszars, which is bad for PR and bad for business, but after a judicious assassination they hammer out a pact.

This fourth book of the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles tells of peace agreements with their rivals and the growth of their now-international business ventures.

It also follows Jean-Louis as he meets and falls in love with a young artist, Magda, who desires travel and adventure but never imagined the world the Kandeskys inhabit

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Remembering Anne Rice

When Anne Rice died, it was a bit of a surprise, although I hadn’t thought about her for several years.

As a young reporter with the San Jose Mercury-News in the early 1970s, I planned to write a novel. Like many of my contemporaries, I had sheaves of pages stuffed in a desk drawer.

Like many of my contemporaries, it never materialized.

After about five years, one child and a divorce, I left the job, moved to far northern California (Humboldt County), and went back to school as a single mom. It was a hard but heady life with no money and lots of challenges.

At that time, I was closer in age to my professors than to the typical students and I made the perhaps mistake of telling one of the guys in the English department that I’d wanted to write a novel. He took me at my word and gave me information of the Jackson-Phelan Award for Young California Writers.

Hanging around with the English and History department professors and grad students was a mix of politics and literature and lots and lots of red wine and talk. Exotic people and places floated around.

One of the history people had spent two years with the Peace Corps in Muslim Eastern Africa and told stories of trying to teach during Ramadan, when students were faint with hunger.

Another one had an annual dinner party with Moroccan cous-cous and a lamb dish cooked in his tagine.

I dated a guy who’d spent a year at the University of Uppsala and in the dark winter months we made and drank glogg and talked about isolation, alienation and suicide rates.

Through this, I kept some notes and began a sort-of journal, not believing that I could have the discipline to actually write a novel, but a couple of my friends persisted, constantly checking on my progress.

I finally settled on a coming-of-age idea set in San Francisco in the 1950s through the 1970s. Not The Bell Jar, not The Feminine Mystique, not Sexual Politics or The Second Sex, but something maybe gentler, quieter. A protag who was raised by her Victorian grandmother in an apartment building overlooking Chinatown in the days of the Katherine Gibbs School. Those white-gloved, proper secretaries bumped up against the Haight-Ashbury crowd and blurred a young woman’s identity.

The Jackson-Phelan Award (it still exists in a different form) was designed to encourage young—20 to 35 years old—California residents and natives working on writing projects. Both fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry were eligible. The Phelan part was based on a bequest from a former Senator, James Phelan, and established in the 1930s. The Jackson part was a legacy from Joseph Henry Jackson, literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and established in 1955. Later critic Anthony Boucher said Jackson, called “the best bookman west of the Mississippi” went beyond that geographic description. 

I borrowed my sister’s typewriter and began, asking a friend to proofread.

With hindsight, I don’t remember how long it was—probably several weeks, if not months—before I had about thirty pages that seemed suitable for submission.

Bought a manila envelope and shipped them off to the offices in San Francisco.

I didn’t hear immediately and a few months later, received my partial manuscript back with a few judges’ comments (they like my descriptions) but no prize.

Later, one of my friends in the English department mentioned he’d heard who won that year.

It was Anne Rice for The Interview With the Vampire.

There seems to be a fine irony that almost forty years later my son-in-law, after my first mystery was published, challenged me to write a vampire novel. The creative world lost a major figure when she died, and I lost a small piece of my past.

I’m now writing a second mystery series and the eleventh book in The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, a very different series of stories from the vampire Lestat.

Michele Drier is a fifth generation Californian. During her career in journalism at daily newspapers in California, she won awards for investigative series. She is the past president of two Sisters in Crime chapters and current president of NorCal Sisters in Crime. She’s on the national board of Bouchercon, a fan mystery convention named for Anthony Boucher, and co-chaired  Bouchercon 2020.

Michele Drier is a fifth-generation Californian and spent better than 20 years as a reporter and editor at California daily newspapers. She is the past president of Capitol Crimes, a Sisters in Crime chapter; the Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime, current president of NorCal Sisters in Crime, and co-chaired Bouchercon 2020.

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