The Vampire’s Private Detective

A Sapphic Vampire Noir Romance
by Maeve Hollow

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Vampire × Private Detective, Noir Mystery, Cold Case, Immortal × Mortal, Ice Queen, Butch × Femme, She Always Asks First, Explicit Feeding, Power Exchange, Control Swap, Touch Starved, Found Family

She hired me to solve a murder. Hers. In 1798.

Sloane Barrett has three rules for clients. No lies. No touching. No wanting them.

Lucasta Vale has all three in trouble before she sits down.

She owns Vesper, the most exclusive sapphic club in Saint Orison. She pays in antique gold. She has no pulse. And she wants Sloane to find out who murdered her in 1798.

One problem: Lucasta can’t remember the night she died. Somebody cut it out of her.

The memories are still in her blood. The only way to read them is for Sloane to offer a vein, and a vampire’s bite feels nothing like a blood test. Every taste gives them one more piece of that night, and tells them both a great deal more than the case requires.

Then a bartender loses three days and comes back with a wound in the same place as Lucasta’s scar. A retired nurse vanishes with a little violet bottle. And the trail runs straight to the one woman Lucasta has never told no: the doctor who made her.

Sloane was hired to find a killer. She’s about to find out what her client did for the hundred years after, and whether she can hold all of it.

The Vampire’s Private Detective is a high-heat sapphic vampire noir romance with a butch PI who notices everything, a 264-year-old ice queen who counts a pulse out loud, bites that have to be asked for in words, a cold case solved in blood and on paper, a control swap at the midpoint, a lot of on-page spice, and a guaranteed HEA. A complete story with no cliffhanger.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A sapphic noir where the client is the murder victim, and she’s sitting in your office
✅ A butch private detective at 38 who reads everyone and gets read right back
✅ An immortal ice queen who asks before every bite and wants the answer in words
✅ Blood as the heat engine: every clue is paid for with a scene
✅ A power swap: she tops until the midpoint, then the detective takes her apart
✅ A villain who is never shrill and never entirely wrong
✅ Real accountability: “I am going to say what I did before I say anything of what was done to me”
✅ A partner, a driver, a bartender, a nurse and a furious cat, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including a strap-on and a semi-public scene), erotic biting and blood drinking, consensual power exchange, non-consensual memory removal and the medical confinement of women by an antagonist, needles, an on-page stabbing and death, coercive control in a past relationship, historical exploitation of vulnerable women including a pregnant seventeen-year-old (not sexual), abduction, drowning peril, and strong language. All characters participating in explicit sexual scenes are adults. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One

The gold hit my desk at six minutes past eleven on a Tuesday night, and my first thought was that somebody’s grandmother was about to get robbed.

Six coins. She laid them down one at a time from a gloved hand, in a line along the edge of my blotter, the way you’d deal cards to someone you already knew you could beat. They were small and thick and the color of good butter, and they landed with a sound no paper money has ever made.

“A retainer,” she said. “I understand that’s customary.”

I should go back four minutes.

Rain had been working on Saint Orison since Sunday. It came in sideways off the harbor and found the hole in the Orpheum’s marquee under my window, so the whole office ticked like a cheap watch. Jessa had gone home at eight with the Feldman file under her arm and orders for me to eat something that didn’t come out of the machine in the lobby of a cinema that shut in 2019. I hadn’t. I had my boots on the radiator, my jacket over the chair, and a skip trace open on a dentist who’d quit paying two ex-wives at once, and I was good for another hour when somebody knocked on the frosted glass.

Nobody knocks. The street door sticks, it’s four flights, and the bulb on three has been dead since spring. Clients phone. Process servers lean on the buzzer. A person who climbs all that at eleven at night without calling first has something they’d rather not say into a telephone.

“It’s open.”

She walked in without a drop of rain on her.

That was the first thing I wrote down afterward, when I was trying to act like a professional. No umbrella. Nothing dark at the shoulders. Her suit was the red of wine held up to a lamp, cut close at the waist, the trousers breaking over heels that had never met a puddle. Black silk under the jacket, open at the throat. Deep brown skin. Black hair pinned up and held with something that caught the light, and at her ears, stones the same red as the suit and a couple of centuries older.

She was the best-looking woman who had ever come through that door, and I’ve had two actresses and a state senator. I noted it and filed it under not relevant. It didn’t stay filed.

“Ms. Barrett.”

“That’s what it says on the glass.”

“It says Barrett and Park.”

“Park’s the smart one. She went home.”

Her mouth moved at one corner. She took in the office in a single pass: the filing cabinets, the dead ficus, the couch I sleep on more than I’d admit to a doctor. Then me. She took longer over me. I’m not small and I don’t dress to be looked at. Charcoal suit, yesterday’s shirt, a nose a repo client rearranged in 2016. Women who look like her generally glance once and move along. She went over me like a document she intended to sign.

“Lucasta Vale,” she said. Her voice was low and in no hurry, with an accent that had been worn smooth a long time ago. “I own a club on Carrow Street. I’d like to engage you to look into a murder.”

“Police do murders. I do husbands and money.”

“The police weren’t much interested at the time. I doubt they’ve warmed to it.” She considered the client chair, a hard wooden thing I keep uncomfortable so people get to the point, and sat in it as though it had been built to her measure. “It was some while ago.”

“How long is some while?”

“The ninth of November, 1798.”

And out came the coins.

I let them lie there. I’ve been offered a retainer in cash, in crypto, and once in a horse. You learn not to reach.

“Cold cases I get about twice a year,” I said. “It’s always a will. Somebody needs great-great-grandpa to have been pushed down the stairs instead of falling, because then the second wife never inherited and the lake house was never hers to sell. I find a parish record, a lawyer waves it at a judge, everybody hates each other for another generation. I charge four hundred a day for it and I don’t take a side. So who’s the estate?”

“There’s no estate.”

“There’s always an estate.”

“No property. No heirs. No one alive to profit or to mind.” She said it pleasantly. “Pick one up, if you like. They don’t bite.”

I picked one up. It was heavier than it had a right to be. A man’s head in profile on one side, laurel wreath and a weak chin, and on the other a shield shaped like the spade on a playing card. 1794. The edges were soft from a lot of thumbs. I’ve handled enough fakes for insurers to know the greasy, too-perfect feel of a cast copy, and this didn’t have it.

“George the Third,” I said. “These are English.”

“This city took any gold that came off a ship. It still does.”

A coin like that goes for two thousand on a slow day. I had twelve grand sitting on my blotter and a woman across from me who hadn’t blinked in a while. I put it back in its place in the row.

“All right. No estate. Then who was the victim to you?”

She began taking off her right glove. She did it one finger at a time, loosening each, and then drew the whole thing off slowly, and I watched it go because there was nothing else in the room worth watching. Her hand was long and bare, with no rings on it.

“I was,” she said.

I’ve got a face for moments like that. Every investigator does. You let it go slack and friendly while you work out whether the person is lying, sick, or selling something, and how far the door is.

“You’re the victim.”

“I’m the deceased. I believe the distinction matters, legally.”

“Of a murder in 1798.”

“Yes.”

“You look well.”

“Thank you. I’ve had time to get over it.”

She took a folded paper from inside her jacket and slid it across with one finger. It was a certified copy, with the diocesan archive’s raised seal in the corner and last Thursday’s date on the stamp. A page from a burial register, the handwriting brown and slanted and full of long esses. I read where her fingernail rested.

Lucasta Vale, spinster of this parish, aged thirty-six years. Died the ninth day of November 1798 of a wound beneath the ribs. Buried the eleventh.

“Somebody with your name died,” I said. “I’ve met four Sloane Barretts. One of them’s a man in Tulsa.”

“You spent nine years in insurance fraud. You must have taken the pulse of someone who was meant to be dead.”

“Twice. Both of them had one.”

She turned her bare wrist up on my desk and left it there.

I know when I’m being played, and the smart thing is to stay on your own side of the furniture. I reached over anyway. Her skin was cold. I don’t mean cold from the weather. I mean cold the way a marble step is, all the way through, the same temperature as the room. I set two fingers in the groove under her thumb and pressed. I moved them and pressed harder. I counted to thirty by the clock over the door.

Nothing. A wrist is never really still. Even on a corpse you imagine something, your own blood knocking in your fingertips. Hers was as quiet as the desk.

“Try the throat,” she said. “Everyone does.”

I got up and went around. She tipped her head to the side to give me room, and that put the long line of her neck under the lamp, and I stood over her and fitted my fingers under the hinge of her jaw.

Up close she smelled of clove and bitter orange and, under those, something cool and mineral, like a cellar. No pulse there either. I slid lower, to where the artery ought to be jumping. Smooth, cool, silent. And while I stood there hunting for it I noticed the other thing, the one my eyes had been trying to tell me since she sat down. The silk over her chest wasn’t moving.

“You’re not breathing.”

Her ribs rose, deliberately, and she spoke on the way out. “I do it to talk. Otherwise it’s a habit, and I’m long out of practice.”

“There are drugs that’ll drop a pulse to where I can’t find it.”

“Several. I’ve met the women who make them.” She looked up at me from under my hand. Her eyes were very dark and entirely calm. “None of them do this.”

She smiled, and the smile kept going. Her upper lip drew back and the two canines came down, unhurried, a quarter inch of clean white point, as neat as a cat’s.

My body got there before the rest of me did. Every hair I own stood up. Something old in the base of my skull said run, flat and certain, in a voice I’d never heard it use. I didn’t run. I didn’t even take my hand off her neck, and I’d like some credit for that, though I’m not sure it was courage.

“Sit down, Ms. Barrett,” she said, quite gently, around the teeth. “Before you decide to be brave about it.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

“You’re not. Your heart was at sixty-four when I knocked, which is slow for a woman who drinks that much coffee. Seventy-one when I sat. Eighty-eight when I took my glove off, and I’ll admit I took my time.” The points slid back up out of sight. “It’s a hundred and twelve now. Roughly a third of that is fear.”

“And the rest?”

“You’re the detective.”

I took my hand back. I walked around the desk, which seemed to have gotten longer, and sat, and put both palms flat on the blotter where I could see them.

“Vampire,” I said. It came out sounding like somebody else’s word.

“It’s a vulgar term. I’ve spent two centuries failing to find a better one.”

“And there are more of you.”

“Enough to fill a club on Carrow Street, most nights.” She folded the glove in her lap. “You’re taking this well.”

“I’m not taking it at all yet. I’m going to take it around four in the morning, on that couch, with a drink. Right now I’m working.” I pulled a legal pad over, because a pen in my hand has always made me feel like I had the room. “You’ve had two hundred and twenty-eight years. Why are you in my office tonight?”

“Because for most of them I believed I knew what happened. I was told a stranger did it, for my purse. I was told a great many things.” For the first time she looked at something that wasn’t me: the window, the rain running down it. “I remember almost none of it myself. A wet street. Then waking, with a different appetite.”

“Told by who?”

“People who are no longer available for interview.”

I wrote that down word for word. In my trade you learn the shape of an answer that’s been walked around the block before it’s let in the house, and that was one. I let it go by, for now.

“So what changed?”

“Eight nights ago one of my bartenders didn’t come in. Inez Duarte. Thirty-two. Four years behind my bar and never so much as late.” Her voice had lost some of its polish. “She came back on the fourth night and apologized for oversleeping. She thought it was still Sunday. Three days, gone clean out of her head. And she had a wound.”

She laid her bare hand flat against her own left side, just under the breast, over the wine-colored wool.

“Here. Small. Very neat. Between the same two ribs where I have a scar I’ve carried since the night I died. Same place, same angle, the same width across.”

“You compared them.”

“I’ve had a long time to learn my own body. I know it to the inch.”

I looked at her hand where it rested. I thought about what was under it, and then a little too long about what was under that, and wrote L side, under ribs to give my eyes somewhere else to be.

“Could be coincidence.”

“Do you believe in those?”

“I bill people by the day to prove they’re not.”

“Then you see my difficulty. Either someone remembers how I was killed and wants me to know it, or someone never stopped.” She leaned forward an inch. “I’d like to learn which before another of my girls loses a week.”

“Why me? There has to be somebody on your side of the fence who does this.”

“There are a few. Every one of them owes somebody. So I asked around for an investigator in this city who can’t be bought, and your name came up three times. None of the three meant it as a compliment.” She tilted her head. “One was a vice president at Harlan Mutual. He told me you walked away from a pension over forty families in a building on Dock Street and a report he’d asked you to lose.”

“He asked me to misplace it. I’ve got a very good filing system.”

“He called you a difficult bitch.”

“It’s on my cards.”

“It ought to be. I have had two hundred years of people telling me what I would like to hear, Ms. Barrett.” Her eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up without any apology. “I’m in the market for a difficult bitch.”

That did it, if I’m honest. That and Inez Duarte. I could have walked away from the dead woman, but not from a bartender who thought it was still Sunday.

“If I take this,” I said, “I’ve got two rules.”

“Only two?”

“They cover a lot of ground. One. You don’t lie to me. Not to protect me, not to protect yourself, not by leaving a piece out and letting me break my ankle on it later. I find one lie and I keep the gold and you find another detective.”

Something moved behind her face and was gone. “And the second?”

“No touching.”

Her eyebrows went up slowly. “You’ve just had your hand around my throat for most of a minute.”

“That was an examination.”

“Was it? Your pulse had some views.”

“My pulse isn’t on the payroll. You’re a client. Clients sit in that chair, and I sit in this one, and there’s a desk.”

“It’s a very plain desk.” She studied it, and then me, and I felt the look land low in my stomach. “I wonder what it’s been used for.”

“Paperwork.”

“What a waste of good oak.” She sat back. “The first I’ll agree to.”

“And the second?”

“The second I’ll keep until you ask me not to.”

“I won’t.”

“Mm,” said Lucasta Vale. “A hundred and eighteen.”

I took the case. I’d have liked there to be more of a fight about it.

I quoted her my rate and told her what she’d put down would buy a month of me, and that I’d never needed a month for anything. I pushed five of the six back across the blotter.

She didn’t look at them. She picked up the last one in her bare fingers, turned it over once, and held it out above my hand. She kept an exact inch of air between us and waited there until I turned my palm up. Then she let it drop.

“Then be expensive,” she said.

A card followed, set down on the wood. It was black, with one word in gilt, VESPER, and under it a number on Carrow Street. “Tomorrow, after midnight. Inez has agreed to speak with you. Give your name at the door and nothing else.”

“I’ll need everything you’ve got. Records, dates, names. Anybody who knew you then.”

“You’ll have what I have.” She stood, and drew the glove back on as slowly as she’d taken it off, and this time I made a point of looking at the ficus. At the door she stopped with her hand on the frame.

“Ms. Barrett. That second rule. Is it for my protection or yours?”

“Goodnight, Ms. Vale.”

“Lucasta. You’ve had your fingers on my neck.” She smiled with her mouth closed. “Sleep, if you can. You’ll be keeping my hours.”

The door clicked shut behind her. I listened for her on the stairs, four flights of old wood that complain under a cat, and heard only the rain.

I went to the window. Down under the dead marquee a long black car sat at the curb with its lights off. A tall woman in a gray coat was waiting on the pavement with an umbrella the size of a patio table. She held it over my new client for the eight feet between the cinema doors and the car, shut her in, and got behind the wheel.

So that was how she’d come up dry. An umbrella and a driver. I felt better about the world for nearly a full second.

Then I sat back down and read the page properly.

I’d only looked where she pointed. That’s a beginner’s mistake. Either she’d counted on me making it or she’d never given it a thought, and I didn’t know yet which was worse. The entry ran on below the line her fingernail had marked, in the same brown slant, squeezed against the bottom margin.

Attended in her last hour and death attested by S. March, physician.

A doctor. Somebody had been with her at the end, close enough to sign for it. And she’d sat across from me for half an hour, and said she remembered a wet street, and said that everyone who’d told her the rest was past asking.

Maybe S. March was. Two hundred years is a long time. But she’d read this page before she handed it to me, she didn’t strike me as a woman who skipped the bottom line, and she hadn’t said the name once.

I wrote it on the pad. S. March. I underlined it twice.

It was about then that I ran out of things to do with my hands, and the rest of me finally got a word in.

I was wet. I don’t mean a little. I was soaked through my shorts and slick down the inside of one thigh, swollen enough that the seam of my trousers was a problem every time I shifted in the chair. I’d been that way since around the time she took her glove off. I had sat there asking questions like a professional with my clit beating time against a strip of charcoal wool, and she’d been counting the whole while. A hundred and eighteen. She had known exactly what she was listening to.

It had been two years since anybody had put a hand on me. Before that I’d spent my whole adult life knowing precisely who I wanted and what to do about it, and it had generally involved me doing the looking. Tonight a dead woman had walked up four flights, read my heart rate back to me like a gas meter, and left me in this state without touching anything but a coin.

I thought about taking care of it. I’ll put that on the record. I thought about unbuckling my belt right there at the desk and getting a hand down the front of my shorts, two fingers either side of my clit, with her voice still in the room saying until you ask me not to. It would have taken a minute at the outside. I could feel exactly how it would go, how hard and how fast, and whose mouth I’d be thinking about when I got there, and what was behind her upper lip.

I kept both hands flat on the blotter instead. It was pure spite. I wasn’t going to give it to her, even with her gone and nobody to know.

I’d handed her two rules. I made a third for myself, no getting off over a client, and I already had a fair idea which of the three would go first.

When I trusted my knees I swept the five coins into my palm to lock them up. They were cold as creek stones, as you’d expect from metal that had ridden across town in a glove on a night like this.

The sixth was still where I’d put it down, in the middle of the blotter.

I picked it up, and it was warm.

It had the heat of something that’s been shut in a living fist, held tight for a long while by somebody with blood moving in them. I turned it over. The spade shield, the weak chin, 1794. I’d felt her wrist. I’d had my fingers on her throat. There wasn’t a degree of heat anywhere in that woman to give.

I sat in the ticking dark above a dead cinema with a warm gold coin in my hand, and I waited for it to cool.

It didn’t.

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The First Vintage — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

A year after the night in Box Five, there is a small violet bottle standing on the velvet rail with a tag in Lucasta’s own hand: You asked for this. Look. She laid that night down on purpose. Tonight she drinks it back with Sloane’s blood in her mouth, they both get it from the other side, and then Lucasta opens the detective’s bag and sets out to beat it.

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