José de la Rosa, Vampiro [Vampire] (2010)

Jose de la Rosa is chiefly a writer of romantic fiction, but he has other strings to his bow: not only this vampire novel, but also a collection of epistolary short stories set in the eighteenth century and La clave Agrippa, a thriller also featuring Revel Colina, the rare-book finder at the centre of Vampiro, and another high-stakes search for a book containing powerful magic. This novel rests upon the now relatively familiar motif of a human finding it desirable to become a vampire. However, rather than love for a vampire driving protagonist Sibila Mondragon’s desire from which she has watched her mother die a slow and painful death. At the start of the novel, she can already feel the first symptoms and these worsen as it progresses, intensifying the urgency of her quest to find out how to become a vampire.