The Swordmaster

From the Sunday Times bestselling author, Kate Heartfield, comes a swashbuckling Vampires of Dumas story, featuring a new story arc following Françoise de Montesquiou d'Artagnan, a minor nobleman's daughter who travels to Paris and becomes embroiled in a war between shapeshifters and vampires.

For two days and three nights, Françoise de Montesquiou d'Artagnan has slept, trapped in a strange dream of a shifting world of spirits. Everyone in the dream is clad in the forms of animals, including Françoise herself, and they are discussing secret affairs of monsters and princes—until a host of vampires attacks them in the dream. A man with a beautiful voice faces them down, telling her to run.

Françoise wakes in her grave, buried by her grieving parents and abandoned by her fiancé—and determined to find the man who'd saved her life, identifiable only by his voice. She flees to Paris and finds people like her: the Benandanti, born in their cauls, and blessed with the gift to enter the spirit realm in dreams. She learns that the vampires who attacked her in spirit are a threat in the waking world—and that they sit in the highest positions in the land. Only she and her new brothers and sisters can bring them down.

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Release date

Audiobook: 8 September 2026