My locally available library system is very strongly slanted to the Francophone, is the thing; genre stuff turns up betimes but it seems really pretty random what will and won't; I may just read the first couple of chapters in a bookshop and see how it grabs me.
Charlie Huston is a he; he has recently moved from hardboiled noir into hardboiled noir with vampires. Tough-minded in a Dashiel Hammett sort of way, and uncompromising about the seamier side of human nature, without overly much macho bullshit though the greater resilience of vampires to physical violence does allow for rather a lot of that even by noir standards; a rather nicely worked out set of vampire subcultures in Manhattan, I've read two books of a projected five and am on tenterhooks for the third to make it here as it was supposedly released in the US on Boxing Day (insert well-worn rant on arbitrariness of US book distribution in Canada here). So far, the setting has good people, a much more convincing take on vampire politics than most, and some intriguing bits of world-shape; the second one in particular is Machiavellian in ways that feel a little claustrophobic, but he does very well at setting up a believable realpolitik situation that has stayed more or less stable for some decades under a specific set of stresses but shows signs of coming apart messily in the near future, which is a shape of plot tension that very much appeals to me.
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Charlie Huston is a he; he has recently moved from hardboiled noir into hardboiled noir with vampires. Tough-minded in a Dashiel Hammett sort of way, and uncompromising about the seamier side of human nature, without overly much macho bullshit though the greater resilience of vampires to physical violence does allow for rather a lot of that even by noir standards; a rather nicely worked out set of vampire subcultures in Manhattan, I've read two books of a projected five and am on tenterhooks for the third to make it here as it was supposedly released in the US on Boxing Day (insert well-worn rant on arbitrariness of US book distribution in Canada here). So far, the setting has good people, a much more convincing take on vampire politics than most, and some intriguing bits of world-shape; the second one in particular is Machiavellian in ways that feel a little claustrophobic, but he does very well at setting up a believable realpolitik situation that has stayed more or less stable for some decades under a specific set of stresses but shows signs of coming apart messily in the near future, which is a shape of plot tension that very much appeals to me.