Blood Games [Paperback]

If you're a vampire, please pay close attention. Do you find your immortal life increasingly burdened with the effort of keeping up false appearances? If so, you're not alone. Garreth Mikaelian, a sleuthing vampire, knows how you feel in his third (and tedious) mystery (after Blood Hunt and Bloodlines). He's only been a vampire for 15 years and already it's evident he's unlike his fellow humans. They grow older, while he stays young. His own son looks more like a twin brother every day. The time is coming, his vampire-friendly advisers warn, when he'll have to abandon his old life. Meanwhile, he's still a Kansas cop and on the trail of an albino psycho whose victims include Garreth's partner and sometime lover. Complicating the chase is the possibility that the vicious killer may be a vampire. An indiscreet vampire is a threat to all vampires. Garreth must determine whether to kill him if he is or jail him if he is not. So begins an interminable manhunt. But then just about everything in this novel is interminable. As the popularity of Anne Rice's novels (or on the cult level of such films as Near Dark and Innocent Blood) shows, there's always room for another original take on the vampire theme. Unfortunately, Killough has nothing new or imaginative to offer. Her vampires are a boring lot without a good scare in any of them. (June)paperback, BloodWalk.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

"This police procedural with a supernatural twist is one surprise after another; expect that readers will enjoy the tale." -- The Midwest Book Review, May 2001

From Lee Killough, the author of BloodWalk, Meisha Merlin presents the new Garreth Mikaelian vampire novel Blood Games Garreth Mikaelian has an enemy... Time. He thought he knew all about being a vampire. After all, he has had fifteen years in the life to learn. But now he discovers that while Time ignores him, he cannot ignore it. Around him everyone he knows is aging: fellow officer and periodic lover Maggie Lebekov, friends, parents. His own son now looks more like a brother. The price of his existence, he realizes, is standing rooted while Time carries everything away from him. But suddenly he has more urgent matters to worry about. Baumen's comfortable peace is shattered by sudden death and a lethal trio playing ever escalating blood games. Garreth finds himself racing time to learn whether the trio's leader is the vampire he appears to be and find a way to deal with him. Garreth must locate the suspects before other law enforcement officers do, to be sure they are captured alive... because if not yet vampires, they have drunk vampire blood and if killed will rise again even more deadly, and unstoppable.

Thanks for visiting this page to check out Blood Games. The book was great fun to write. Garreth Mikaelian has always been one of my favorite characters. He was born of that most popular question authors ask themselves: what if. If vampires really existed, how would they live in the real world? The result, Blood Hunt, was a mystery novel rather than a horror novel. That made it difficult to sell...22 rejections, most to the tune of: "We loved this book, but...it's a vampire story that isn't a horror story and we don't know how we'd label and market it". Fortunately you readers didn't care how it was labeled. You bought Blood Hunt, and its sequel Bloodlinks, and when Meisha Merlin brought them back from Out Of Print death in the omnibus BloodWalk, you bought that, too. In enough numbers that MM asked for new Garreth book. So thank you, readers and Meisha Merlin. Blood Games exists because of you.

Lee Killough has been storytelling almost as long as she can remember, starting somewhere around the age of four or five with making up her own bedtime stories. In grade school the stories became episodes of her favorite radio and TV shows: Straight Arrow, Wild Bill Hickock, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and Dragnet. Beating the episode-writing practice of Trek fans by almost two decades.

Then, in keeping with wisdom that says the golden age of science fiction is about age eleven, a pre-teen Lee discovered science fiction. Having read every horse book in the school and city libraries, and repelled by the "teenager" novels that seemed to be about nothing but high school and boyfriends, she was desperately hunting for something new to read. The science fiction being shelved next to the horse stories, she start leafing through these future/space stories and decided to try one. The books was Leigh Brackett's The Starmen of Llyrdis and…lightning struck. Love at first sight. But along with the pleasure of devouring this marvelous literature came fear. She lived in a small Kansas town with a small library and she could see that as with the horse books, all too soon the section would be read dry.

Lee sometimes tells people that of course she writes SF; she deals with non-human species every day in her day job radiographing animals in the Kansas State University Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. But she really began writing SF to make sure she never ran out of science fiction to read. And because the mystery section adjoined the SF section, leading her to discover mysteries about the same time as SF, her stories tended to combine SF with mystery.

They still do…with a noticeable fondness for cops (the influence of Dragnet, Joseph Wambaugh's books, and TV shows like Hill Street Blues). A ghost cop in "The Existential Man", a vampire cop in Blood Hunt and Bloodlinks, published together in the trade edition BloodWalk, space-going cops, werewolf cops. And the future cops Janna Brill and Mama Maxwell of Dopplegänger Gambit, Spider Play, and Dragon's Teeth, published together in the trade edition Bridling Chaos.

Lee lives and writes in Manhattan, Kansas (notice how Kansas and plains/prairie settings do turn up in her books), where she lives with a non-human—a Miniature Schnauzer—and enjoys a committed relationship with, fittingly, a book dealer.