Nothing to Devour: Motherless Children, Book 3

It’s quite a feat to write a vampire novel without ever once invoking the V-word, but Hirshberg does so with consummate skill in this wrenching third Motherless Children horror novel. The story picks up five years after the mutual massacre of humans and vampires that concluded Good Girls and develops along converging plot lines driven by three primary characters: Emilia, a Mississippi librarian taken as cross-country hostage by a bandaged blood-drinker whom she dubs “the Invisible Man”; Sophie, a vampire who miraculously survived her earlier near-fatal mauling; and Jess, matriarch of a stockade on San Juan Island that is home to her “family” of survivors and a beacon to vengeful vampires. As in the previous books, Hirshberg keeps the traditional vampire lore to a minimum, focusing instead on his characters’ inner lives and the compulsions, grief, sorrow, loneliness, and will to survive that drive them all. His novel is a dramatic tour de force that compels reader sympathy for mortals and monsters alike. (Nov.)