Su-Yeon is a detective investigating a string of suicides at a nursing home in Seoul. Every death involved a person jumping from a sixth-floor window and leaving a cryptic note and origami flowers by the scene. However, the victims were entirely drained of blood before they died, which leads Su-Yeon to think that it wasn’t a suicide at all. She teams up with a shady detective called Violette, and the story switches back and forth between their case and Violette’s time as an adopted child in France, when she met her first vampire.
Seon-Ran’s slice-of-life writing is excellent, and transported me to modern day Seoul. Her themes and subject matter are extremely compelling, such as the nursing home’s lack of care, respect, or resources for the elderly population. She continuously touches on the way we unconsciously value human life when affected by age or illness, and the home is as barren, heartless and entirely unforgiving as the book’s main antagonist.
Violette’s childhood flashbacks are another highlight. The author captures the feeling of being stuck between two worlds, with Violette’s French parents trying to teach her about her Korean heritage but always making her feel awkward. I also loved the scenes spent developing her relationship with the vampire Lily. Violette is constantly questioning aspects of vampire life and Seon-Ran adds her unique spin on the mythos, like Lily being able to vaguely taste but not properly distinguish human food.
Overall, an entertaining police procedural and vampire novel, but I wish the author had spent more time developing the ending, as the story wrapped up fairly quickly.
Book review by Rachel Denham-White
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A lover of sci-fi always dreaming of the universe and waiting for aliens, Cheon Seon Ran made her debut with Broken Bridge in 2019. She was awarded the Grand Prize in the 4th Korea Sci-Fi Literature Awards for her novel A Thousand Blues.
She’s continued writing novels since.
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