Quiver

A masterful debut thriller about the original female Dracula and an underground gothic cult reenacting her ritualized killings in present day London In sixteenth-century Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed over six hundred servant girls in order to bathe in their blood. She believed this practice would keep her skin youthful and her beauty immortal.Quiver tells the story of Danica, a forensic psychologist who works at a former insane asylum-turned-forensic hospital. One of Danica’s mental patients is Malcolm Foster, who is imprisoned for murdering a fourteen-year-old girl. Foster is a menacing but fascinating patient and Danica begins to suspect that Foster may have been the head of a gothic cabal idolizing Bathory. Her peers dismiss her discoveries, while disturbing incidents begin following her home from work.Soon after her arrival in London, Danica receives a mysterious note from Maria, a seductive archivist with whom Danica has had an intriguing and complicated past. Maria claims she has Bathory’s diaries that chronicle her relentless torture of young women. As Maria increasingly insinuates herself into Danica’s life, soon Danica is in too deep to notice that Maria’s motivations are far from selfless; in fact, they may just cost Danica her life.A masterful debut thriller about the original female Dracula and an underground gothic cult reenacting her ritualized killings in present day London In sixteenth-century Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed over six hundred servant girls in order to bathe in their blood. She believed this practice would keep her skin youthful and her beauty immortal.Quiver tells the story of Danica, a forensic psychologist who works at a former insane asylum-turned-forensic hospital. One of Danica’s mental patients is Malcolm Foster, who is imprisoned for murdering a fourteen-year-old girl. Foster is a menacing but fascinating patient and Danica begins to suspect that Foster may have been the head of a gothic cabal idolizing Bathory. Her peers dismiss her discoveries, while disturbing incidents begin following her home from work.Soon after her arrival in London, Danica receives a mysterious note from Maria, a seductive archivist with whom Danica has had an intriguing and complicated past. Maria claims she has Bathory’s diaries that chronicle her relentless torture of young women. As Maria increasingly insinuates herself into Danica’s life, soon Danica is in too deep to notice that Maria’s motivations are far from selfless; in fact, they may just cost Danica her life.Holly Luhning grew up in southern Saskatchewan. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature, madness, and theories of the body. She has received a Saskatchewan Lieutenant-Governor’s Arts Award and her collection of poetry, Sway, was nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award. Holly presently resides in Montreal. Quiver is her first novel and she is at work on her next thriller, Viper.