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On a grassy knoll in the Carpathians a young man, newly returned from London, stands in a family graveyard. What he sees is an unspeakable desecration, a crime against his father and the family Dracul.

In an ancient castle an English journalist disappears, while a young woman awaits the illicit embrace of her great-uncle, Prince Vlad.

In a land of superstition and faith, an evil covenant has been kept for four centuries. Now the young man, Arkady Tsepesh, has returned to inherit that pact, to learn the dark truths that will seize his soul and everything he holds dear.

A novel that dares to penetrate the myth of the family Dracul by beginning fifty years before Bram Stoker's Dracula. Here is the shattering chronicle of one man's dark heritage, of a family bound by blood, torn by the terrible choices their own evil would demand

It is Amsterdam, 1871, twenty-five years before the start of Stoker's novel, and twenty-five years following Arkady Tsepesh's flight from his family's ancestral castle with his wife and young son, Stefan, after learning that he and his family are bound by an ancient covenant to serve their ancestor, Prince Vlad Tsepesh, who is also known as Dracula. For Vlad is a vampire, and the fated firstborn sons in every generation must bring him the victims he needs to survive. Arkady had tried to break the covenant and failed. He is now a vampire, separated from his beloved wife and son, with one all-consuming desire - to destroy Vlad before he draws Stefan into eternal service through the blood ritual. But Arkady has come too late to Amsterdam. Vlad kidnaps Stefan, and spirits him away to the castle in Transylvania to undergo the blood ritual. Arkady enlists the help of Stefan's stepbrother, Abraham Van Helsing, in his thrilling battle against Vlad, as he seeks to free his family and put an end to the age-old blood covenant - even if it means he must destroy his own son.

For a half century, a beautiful woman has been a prisoner to one man's cruelty. She is Zsuzsanna, the once-exquisite niece of Mad Tsepesh--also known as Dracula--robbed of her beauty and her youth by Dracula himself. Now, through a ceremony of blood and passion, Zsuzsanna is about to be set free-under a woman's caress.

Zsuzsanna's rebirth comes from the touch of the vampire Elisabeth of Bathory, the beautiful, sensuous countess determined to destroy Mad forever. But when Zsuzsanna travels to England with Elisabeth, she will be bitterly surprised. For while the lovers stalk Abraham Van Helsing, the mysterious doctor who is the key to Vlad's destruction, Zsuzsanna discovers that Elisabeth has a secret life . . . and a pact with the one being more powerful and more dangerous than Dracula: the mythical Dark Lord.

From the rosy clouds of a Rumanian dawn to the touch of velvet against flesh, Lord of the Vampires is an experience in breathtaking sensuality and true terror. With this spellbinding novel, the crowning work in Jeanne Kalogridis's heralded vampire trilogy, the final drama is played out with the soul of humankind hanging in the balance.