For the women who read after midnight
The CatacombBrides
Natalie Mann's debut novel · Book One of The Widow's Lace Trilogy
Paris, 1896. Beneath the golden hush of the Palais Garnier, a centuries-old vampire coven rules the shadows with an iron fist and impeccable etiquette. When a young woman is discovered arranged on a bier of bone deep within the catacombs — clad in a wedding gown, veiled in white roses — an ancient order is threatened, and a dark reckoning begins.
Don't blame us if you're up past 3:00 AM.
The Novel
Paris, October 1896.
Françoise de Vaux, vampire and head of the Faubourg Saint-Germain coven, is summoned at three in the morning by the Prefect of Police. A young woman has been found arranged on a bier of bone beneath the city — dressed in a Belgian wedding gown she did not own, with two wounds at her throat.
She is the second such killing. There will be more.
The investigation forces Françoise to call on Thomas Drake, the Englishman she has not spoken to without a coven table between them in a hundred years — and to confront the silence they have each been reading wrong.
"A city of gas lamps and gilded etiquette — and a coven that has ruled its shadows for centuries."
Hardcover · eBook · Audiobook
Set in
Paris, 1896
Series
Book 1 of 3
Best read
After Midnight
The Author
Natalie Mann
Gothic mysteries · 19th century · worse handwriting.
Natalie Mann writes gothic mysteries set in the 19th century, where the secrets are better and the handwriting is worse. Her debut novel, The Catacomb Brides, is a vampire mystery set in 1890s Paris, exploring a quietly ornate order of immortals governed by centuries of secrecy, etiquette, and the occasional ritual killing beneath the city. She's drawn to themes of belonging, the weight of the past, and the price of immortality, and to vampires shaped by physical signatures — eyes that mirror the Seine at winter dusk — rather than the usual folklore. Her research habit is a hazard; she has spent more hours than she will admit on the tenure of Police Prefect Louis Lépine and the floorplans of the Île Saint-Louis.
Natalie is currently at work on Book Two of The Widow's Lace Trilogy, The Blackfriars Vigil, which moves the story to London. When she is not in the archives, she is listening to serial killer podcasts at 1.5x speed or watching wealthy charter guests come undone on Below Deck.
Natalie lives in Austin, where she maintains a strictly professional relationship with several local cats, and owns more fountain pens than is reasonable for any one human being.