A heart without love is like a world without light. It is where the monsters live...

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Fleeing England and the hangman's noose, Caleb Cade followed the road across Europe for twenty years. In search of happiness, whether in a woman's eyes, the turn of a card or the depths of a brandy glass, the next horizon was always the cure to all his ills. Across those long dusty years, he became a womaniser, then a thief living behind a charmer's smile until, eventually, the road ensnared him in insanity and murder.

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It is 1708, the Age of The Enlightenment, and Caleb has returned to London a broken man, incapable of love and terrified of the grave, his only friend the half-imagined ghost of his long dead brother. Haunted by his own demons, he relives the tragic events of his childhood while fearing the King of the Winter is still peering through his window, all cold of heart and sly of eye, finally ready to take him down to the damnation he knows he deserves.

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But when one road ends another begins. A Huguenot libertine, a strange man around which strange things happen, befriends Caleb. He is a man with an insatiable appetite for all the pleasures of life, a man who can seemingly bend people to his will and make them dance to his own debauched tune, a man with sparkling blue January eyes and snow-white hair.

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A man who might not be a man at all...

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A dark historical fantasy that is by turns haunting, romantic, humorous, disturbing and ultimately moving.

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Book One of In the Absence of Light; a story of love, loss, vampires and the black hearts of men.