The Matriarch: Changeling
Kevin Ranson
"Throughout American history, every major conflict has been due to either a misunderstanding between parties or a failure to live up to a promise – and needless bloodshed was always the result."
- From The Matriarch: Changeling
And bloodshed was something with which Janiss Connelly was all too familiar, either by her own or someone else's hand. Friends. Lovers. Enemies. But as the administrator of Cedarcrest Sanctum, it was a necessary evil: keeping the facility's residents safe – and, thanks to infusions of her vampiric blood, alive – was both her responsibility and mission.
It is a mission that is jeopardized by a very old – and private – vampire living and working as a college professor in Charleston, West Virginia. Janiss visits to determine her undead "neighbor's" true intentions, only to find that she and Cedarcrest are on the professor's "syllabus." Left with no choice, the administrator must become the student and ask her own hated teacher for the deadly tutelage she needs to rescue the Sanctum.
In The Matriarch: Changeling, Janiss will learn that friends and enemies are never who they seem to be – a lesson that must be paid in blood.
Kevin Ranson continues to paint layer after layer of nuanced suspense, mystery and horror onto the canvas of his Matriarchseries. With each keystroke, he makes his characters deeper and more nuanced, and, in turn, them - their pasts, presents and futures - more real. Interweaving historical fact and fiction, his landscape is smart, rich and, combined with Janiss and the friends and foes of Cedarcrest, makes The Matriarch: Changeling a worthy penultimate chapter in this groundbreaking vampire saga.