Review: Daughters of Shadow and Blood – Book I: Yasamin by J. Matthew Saunders

Daughters of Shadow and Blood by J. Matthew Saunders
Published by Independently Published on May 3, 2015
Genres: Fiction, Mystery/Thriller/Suspense, Paranormal
Pages: 335 pages
Format: eARC
ISBN: 0986333115
ASIN: B00T27F00W
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Buda, Ottoman Hungary, 1599: Yasamin, the naïve daughter of an Ottoman bureaucrat, finds herself trapped in an arranged marriage to the son of the powerful governor of Buda. She is unprepared for the gossip and scheming rampant in the palace but realizes she faces more than petty jealousies when someone tries to drown her in the baths on the day before her wedding. An unearthly menace lurks in the palace corridors, and the one person able to protect Yasamin is a soldier named Iskander, who seems to appear whenever she needs him. Charming and confident, he is nothing like her new husband, but trusting either of them could be a deadly mistake.

Berlin, Germany, 1999: Adam Mire, an American professor of history, discovers a worn, marked-up copy of Dracula. The clues within its pages send him on a journey across the stark landscape of Eastern Europe, searching for a medallion that once belonged to Dracula himself. But a killer hounds Adam’s footsteps, and each new clue he uncovers brings him closer to a beguiling, raven-haired woman named Yasamin Ashrafi, who might be the first of Dracula’s legendary Brides.

Adam has an agenda of his own, however, a quest more personal than anyone knows. One misstep, and his haunted past could lead to death from a blade in his back … or from Yasamin’s fatal embrace.

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Readers of books like The Historian by  Elizabeth Kostova, DaVinci Code by Dan Brown and The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe, will feel right at home reading Daughters of Shadow and Blood – Book I: Yasamin by J. Matthew Saunders, which is slated to be a trilogy.   It is a mystery/thriller with a paranormal/vampire backstory.  If you are looking for light paranormal fantasy romance this might not be the book for you, as it has a very intricate plot, like the books that I mentioned.  Saunders weaves history, danger, thrills and paranormal elements into a seamless mystery tapestry.

This is not a story that lets the readers mind wander you have a lot of characters and twist and turns to keep the readers intellect engaged.   The voices and time frames of the story, vary like those of The Historian and The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane; so know that you will be reading different time frames weaved into the same story from the start.  Yes, this is a Dracula inspired tale, with its own historic twists to the folklore.  I will say at times the books pace could have been faster, and with the number of characters, it could be hard to follow.  I think the author would have been better served to keep the plot simpler, without so many characters in this first book, as he is a very good writer.