Follow Maxie Gwenoch as she takes the job of Managing Editor for SNAP Magazine, the world's largest and most popular gossip media covering celebrities around the globe....owned by a family of vampires
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 One, SNAP: The World Unfolds
SNAP, a multinational celeb TV show and magazine, is the holy grail for Maxie Gwenoch. When she snags the job as managing editor, she's looking for fame, fortune and Jimmy Choos. What she finds is a media empire owned by Baron Kandesky and his family. A family of vampires. They're European, urbane, wealthy and mesmerizing. And when she meets Jean-Louis, vampire and co-worker, she's a goner.
When you get to the top savor it; it’s a long way down, my mother’s mantra, hummed through my head as the elevator rose. On the eighteenth floor, a muted sound chimed as the doors slid open, and there it was. The headquarters of SNAP, the newest, cutting-ist edge gathering-of-information machine covering people who matter in the world.
As I stepped into the lobby I was deafened by the silence. Two receptionists sat behind the black marble counter, showing only their heads with headsets. They were murmuring something, but so quietly I couldn’t hear words. The famous SNAP logo etched into the wall-to-wall, ceiling-high mirror reflected the backs of their heads.
The reflection only showed my head and shoulders, my body disappearing as I neared the black slab. The receptionists were both blonds, so fair their skin had a translucent pale blue tone sliced by mouths slathered in Russian Red lipstick. At least I hoped it was lipstick.
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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
Her Amy Hobbes Newspaper Mysteries are Edited for Death, (called “Riveting and much recommended” by the Midwest Book Review), Labeled for Death and Delta for Death. A stand-alone, Ashes of Memories was published May 2017.
Her paranormal romance series, SNAP: The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles, was named the best paranormal vampire series of 2014 by PRG. Book Eleven, SNAP: Pandemic Games was published in 2022
Her new series is the Stained Glass Mysteries, Stain on the Soul and Tapestry of Tears, and she’s working on the third, Resurrection of the Roses.
She lives in Sacramento with her cat, Malley.
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