A few days back I told you about the moment this book finally found its city. Since then I’ve been living in New Orleans every day, and I owe you the fuller version of where things stand.
Where the book is now
Last Knight is done. Not “done for now.” Done. The manuscript landed at 33 chapters, just under 87,000 words, and it ends exactly where it should, which is not where I originally planned for it to end. I spent a long stretch fighting the last few chapters before I admitted the fight itself was the problem. Once I let the ending be smaller and more human instead of bigger and louder, the whole book settled.
It’s also, officially, a series opener. I kept telling myself Last Knight had to stand alone and answer every question by the last page. It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t. Some doors in this book are meant to stay shut a little longer.
Who you’re about to meet
You already know Nicola. Here’s more of the world she’s walking back into.
Delphine Guidry picks her up from the airport in a truck older than some of their friendship. Del is the person who never left New Orleans, never stopped believing Nicola would eventually have to come back to it, and never once says “I told you so” out loud. She says it with her eyebrows instead.
Then there’s Victoria. Centuries old, precise in a way that makes Nicola’s teeth hurt, and the last person in the city Nicola wants owing her anything. Except debts in this book are rarely simple, and blood has a way of writing its own contracts.
And Grace, who writes vampire novels for a living and has strong, confident opinions about how vampires work. New Orleans is about to correct her.
The case that pulls Nicola back into police work isn’t tidy. A body, a family with more to hide than grief, and a warehouse that remembers exactly whose blood it’s owed. Every answer costs her something she wasn’t planning to spend.
A taste of it
Here’s how the book opens, straight from the current draft:
Detective Nicola Knight came home the way ghosts do, quiet and uninvited and three years late.
Her plane hit the tarmac at New Orleans International at 6:13 in the evening, wheels screaming, engines reversing hard enough to jolt her against a seatbelt that had seen better decades. She didn’t flinch. She’d flown rougher into smaller places where the welcome committee was a rusted sign and a filing cabinet of missing persons gone yellow at the edges.
The landing was never the problem. It was the arriving.
Outside, the heat put its hands on her. The air tasted of jet fuel and overripe magnolia and was thick enough to chew.
Between two dead bulbs in the parking garage, a shape resolved. An F150 pushing twenty years old, red gone the color of dried blood, rust eating the wheel wells. Leaning against the driver’s door with her arms crossed and one boot on the tire was Delphine Guidry.
“You look like hell,” Del said, which was as close to I missed you as either of them generally got.
“Thanks.”
“I mean it as a compliment. Considering.”
They fell into fixing the truck’s loose ground wire without discussion, moving around each other the way people do after twenty years, and Del thumped the dashboard with the violence of somebody who loved it.
“Missed this,” Nicola said.
“The truck?”
“Yeah. Especially the part where she quits every other Tuesday.”
“Still runs, don’t she.”
Nicola looked at the engine with its guts open. “Like hell. But so do we.”
The passenger door stuck. Nicola smiled at it anyway.
What’s left
I’m doing a final read through now, chasing down the last handful of continuity threads and making sure every clue still lands where it should. After that, Last Knight moves into cover and formatting, and I’ll start talking dates.
This is the second full length novel I’m publishing as Blair Callahan, and I wanted you to know the city before you meet it. New Orleans doesn’t forget anyone who’s ever belonged to it. Neither does this book.
