Blood of the First is an adult urban fantasy novel written in the first person. It is Book One of The Daywalker Series. It is a complete story with a series door left open at the end, not a fragment that only works if the next volume is already in your hand. The voice belongs to Gabriel Jones, a fifty-five-year-old man who spent twenty-four years in homicide after a hitch in the Army, buried the only life he wanted, and walked into an abandoned cathedral looking for a quiet way to stop.
The book is noir before it is myth. Rain, stone, wet leather, a city that keeps official stories for weather and blackouts, and a man who still counts exits because that is how he was built.

Above the street there is a police department that still has to answer the phone. Below an old church there is a court that has been answering a different kind of phone for centuries. Between those two rooms walks a man who used to carry a badge and now carries something the old world did not budget for. The novel is the pressure of that in-between. It is not a tour of a magic system. It is not a romance with fangs attached. It is the record of a man who already finished his mortal life and was not permitted to stay finished.

Before the cathedral he had a marriage. Her name was Sarah Elizabeth Jones. The book does not treat her as a fridged plot token and it does not turn her into a ghost who issues instructions. She is the life he already buried. Five years of an empty house sat between her death and the night he decided the house was enough. That grief is not a prologue sticker. It is the weather inside him. When the old world starts handing him titles, he still measures them against a kitchen that no longer has her in it.

He was Army before he was a cop. The men who later call him General are not being cute. They are using a word their unit already had. The Fourth Precinct still exists in the same city. The chief still has a name. Retirement paperwork can sit in a drawer and fail to mean what the man thought it meant. Gabe does not stop being a cop because the blood in him changed. He stops being only a cop.

The novel is interested in that remainder: the habits that survive the body.
He does not crave blood the way court vampires crave it. That is not a small distinction. It is the first thing that tells you he is not simply a new recruit in an old species. He can walk in daylight. He does not need sleep the way a mortal needs sleep. He is still the man who walked into St. Jude’s to die.

Cinnamon is his unlikely partner She is about three hundred years old. She is of African descent, with long dark curls and amber-gold eyes that do not bother pretending to be human brown. She wears an open leather duster over a low silk shirt and tight pants, and she carries a pair of ornamental curved short swords in brown leather scabbards on her hips.

She smells of clove, cedar, and vanilla. The book returns to that scent the way Gabe returns to it, which is to say the way a man notices the only warm thing in a cold room. She is a Covenant operative. She remembers how to be human in a way most of her court does not, and that memory is not softness. It is the dangerous part. A three-hundred-year-old woman who still bothers with names and exits is a woman who can still be hurt by the living. Gabe notices that before he has language for the rest.

Their bond is unshakeable. Emotion and sensation move between them. She stays for a reason the book is willing to say in full sentences: He still behaves as if a human life is a particular thing and not a fuel. That is the part of herself she lost and recognized in him.

It is not Anne Rice pastiche and it is not a Dresden Files copy, though readers of both will recognize the neighborhood: old blood, city streets, a man who works cases whether or not the universe asked him to.

Great things are on the horizon