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I’m a newbie author here at Ace, my first release being Night Rising, Vampire Babylon, Book One. Even though I had no idea at the time that I was writing an “urban fantasy,” that’s what it turned out to be after the wonderful Ginjer Buchanan bought this trilogy about a stuntwoman who returns to Hollywood to find her missing father; and when it turns out that Daddy might’ve been involved in some heavy, vampire-related activities, our heroine discovers an erotically inclined vampire underground that will stop at nothing to survive in secrecy.

Writing this series has been a great time, mostly because I get to riff on silver-screen urban legends and create a strange world full of grisly, macabre details—definitely my cup of darkness. For instance, eagle-eyed readers have asked me if the Robby Pennybaker mystery that defines the main plot is based on that Three Men and a Baby ghost story about the phantom boy in the background of one shot. (The answer is yes, even though it turned out that the real movie’s “boy” was only a poster board cut out. Or so they say….)

Night Rising was released last February, but the second book, Midnight Reign, is going to be hitting shelves in February, 2008. MR delves deeper into the first book’s mysteries while concentrating on a vampire serial killer, to boot. In book three (Break of Dawn, September, 2008), the plot lines will all be tied up.

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Yes, a bit like “Twilight Zone,” I know, but there was a point at which recreating her life became “a mission,” my task. I even worried at times, that like my aunt, Gretel Zinsser Munroe, I might die before I finished. But serendipity took care of all that. I met people who were experts on subjects when I hadn’t a clue, for example, about integral calculus. A woman in California, created a web site featuring Du Châtelet and passed on questioners to me. That’s how a retired engineer from Brittany, looking for information about an eighteenth-century relative of his, came to unravel the contradictory stories about Du Châtelet’s first love affair. He put me onto the book about the palace of Versailles that I had only hoped existed. Just in the course of conversation over lunch, a young historian mentioned the military archives at the chateau of Vincennes in Paris. That’s how I found out so much about Du Châtelet’s husband, usually dismissed in a sentence or two in other accounts of her life. At a conference on the Enlightenment, I found out about the web site on eighteenth-century games so that I could describe one of her favorites, cavagnole. A chance meeting in England led to introductions to descendants of her and her husband’s families, and to the editor of the London Royal Society’s Notes and Transactions who asked me to review the new book by I. Bernard Cohen, the big Newton scholar who assumed that a man wrote Du Châtelet’s commentary on the Principia, Newton’s most famous work. At times it seemed as if the marquise had taken charge of insuring my scholarly reputation as well as the completion of her own biography.

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Urban fantasy is an incredibly popular subgenre fantasy that is garnering attention for drawing legions of new fans to the field. Urban Fantasy novels are set in contemporary, real-world settings in which magical and supernatural occurrences take place, as opposed to tradition fantasy who’s settings are wholly imaginary. From wizards in Chicago to telepaths in Louisiana, these authors combine the familiar with the strange and the macabre with the commonplace to great acclaim. Below are just a few of Roc and Ace's stirling authors:

Established names:

Charlaine Harris

Charlaine Harris, who has been writing for over twenty years, is a native of the Mississippi Delta. She began writing plays when she attended Rhodes College in Memphis, and published two stand-alone mysteries a few years later. From there she went on to write successful category mysteries, which are now read in Japan, Great Britain, Greece, Germany, Thailand, Spain, France, and Russia.