Hunting Prince Dracula

About Hunting Prince Dracula

Audrey Rose Wadsworth has survived one serial killer investigation and is not permitted to pause before the next: she and Thomas Cresswell are sent to Romania, to the castle of Vlad the Impaler, to study forensic medicine under a man who may or may not be responsible for a series of murders occurring among the student body that the academy is hiding from public view. Hunting Prince Dracula is the second book in Kerri Maniscalco's Audrey Rose Wadsworth series, relocating the Victorian Gothic atmosphere of the first book to Transylvania without losing any of the series' distinctive narrative texture or forward momentum. Maniscalco's use of the Dracula mythology is lateral rather than direct: she is not adapting Stoker but drawing on the historical Vlad Dracula and the folklore that accrued around him across centuries, and situating Audrey Rose in a castle with that particular history creates a sustained atmosphere of beautiful dread that is among the series' most effective. The mystery structure is tighter in this volume than in the first book, with a more clearly defined problem and a suspect pool that generates genuine uncertainty rather than procedural convenience. Thomas and Audrey Rose's relationship develops through the specific pressure of being isolated together in a foreign country with a killer possibly in their immediate environment, and Maniscalco writes their dynamic with the same mixture of wit and genuine feeling that made the first book's romance compelling. Audrey Rose's struggle with the constraints of her historical moment — the specific and accumulating cost of being a woman who insists on intellectual equality in an era that has officially decided women are decorative — is handled with more nuance here than in the first book, giving her character depth independent of her detective function. Hunting Prince Dracula is Gothic YA mystery at the series' most atmospherically assured, demonstrating the range of settings the Audrey Rose series can sustain without losing its essential character.

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