I seem to be in a fantasy sort of mood at the moment, maybe because I've had a run of pretty decent luck with fantasy novels that have been engaging to read and suitably distracting from real life. This is the first Slatter I've read but I'm quite tempted to try more.
The Crimson Road is a vampire novel with shades of Buffy about it. Violet Zennor has been trained to be fighter since childhood when her mother died giving birth to a still born son, her immensely rich father preparing her for something.
The book opens with his death and Violet's hope that she can be free of the control he has exerted over her life to date. Unfortunately not. Hedrek Zennor made a particularly ill-judged bargain on the night his wife died and after a number of assassins come after her,, and her loved ones, Violet realises that she doesn't really have a choice when it comes to fixing the mess he made.
If it wasn't for some fairly graphic violence and descriptions of abuse that Hedrek inflicted on Violet this could be a young adult novel - 20 year old girl sets out to save the world picking up found family on her quest. As it is, it's got genuinely dark moments that verge on horror and a convincingly gothic atmosphere to compliment the world building.
If there's a fault it's that the timeline doesn't always make complete sense when it comes to the Vampires (called Leech lords here). There is a prophecy, and a lot seems to happen in a relatively short decade compared to the many hundreds of years that some of the Leech lords have been around for. This book takes place in the same world as Slatter's earlier novels - it works fine as a standalone, but possibly if I'd read them all my timeline niggles would be settled.
Overall I really enjoyed this, there were intriguing ideas in the lore building and Violet is a complex heroine who succeeds because of the help she finds along the way, mostly from other women. She stays alive because her enemies underestimate her and how much help she can muster, but it does feel that there's real jepordy along the way. I've been disappointed by books from bigger names (Alice Christina Henry and V E Schwab - but I've only tried one of each and might well be missing out on the really good stuff) working in the same sort of area - this book had whatever it was that I felt was missing for me in those. For good gothic times you could do a lot worse than The Crimson Road.