Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Comes close to duplicating the romance and sweep of Anne Rice’s Lestat novels. Chronicles of Saint Germain series features a 3,500-year-old vampire count who has lived in hundreds of historical hot spots around the world.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series in which the undead are villains as often as they’re romantic heroes. Last few novels have shifted their focus from Anita’s crimefighting to her torrid love affairs with vampires and werewolves (paranormal romance).
P.N. Elrod
Vampire Files series evokes the period noir of Raymond Chandler. Elrod’s newspaper reporter hero, Jack Fleming, uses his vampire powers, including invulnerability to bullets (unless they’re silver), to fight crime in Depression-era Chicago.
Charlaine Harris
Sookie Stackhouse series focuses on a ditsy, mildly psychic waitress who lives in La Bon Temps, a sleepy town in an alternate Louisiana where humans and supernatural beings mingle with caution.
MaryJanice Davidson
Betsy Taylor, a 30-something single who, in her 2004 mass-market debut, Undead and Unwed, is resurrected from a fatal car accident as a vampire. Think Sex and the City—only the city is Minneapolis and it’s filled with demons and vampires.
L.A. Banks
Damali Richards, the heroine of Banks’s Vampire Huntress Legend series, is a Buffy-type warrior with a twist—she’s a black spoken-word artist whose multi-ethnic band may be the only rainbow coalition of musicians moonlighting as vampire slayers.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
A favorite among fans of paranormal romance. Night-Hunter series tells of two eternally warring supernatural species: the vampiric Daimons who prey on humanity, and the self-sacrificing were-beings known as Night Hunters, who regularly save mortal heroines from the clutches of their nemeses. Adventures involving these dark, mysterious and hunky saviors have played out around the globe.
Douglas Clegg
One of the few men to venture into a market where women authors rule. Vampyricon trilogy takes a page from Rice with his historical treatment of Aleric Atheffelde, a young man who, during the Crusades, is introduced to the mysteries of an ancient vampire civilization.
