Suckers

With the publication of Suckers, her darkly comic novel about terminally chic vampires in contemporary London, Anne Billson has been hailed in her native England by Salman Rushdie as "a superb satirist," and her book praised by The Times as "a frothy black comedy."
Set at the end of the greed-is-good Eighties, Suckers features a classic and truly gothic love triangle: Dora, our sardonic heroine, who gets by as a "creative consultant" to the burgeoning fashion crowd; Duncan, a photographer with whom Dora has had a long-term infatuation (even though it is less than mutual on Duncan's part); and Rose Murasaki, who used to be known as Violet, before Dora and Duncan felt compelled to chop her up into easily hidden pieces a decade earlier.
But, impossibly, Violet is back as the frighteningly influential head of a publishing empire that promotes her own extreme sense of style. "Everywhere you looked, there would be women dressed in black-white faces, black hair, mouths painted scarlet. It was The Look." Despite the fact that black is back, however, Dora knows better than to follow the fashions of the times. And when she discovers an ominous takeover in the City that is not financial, and which has the support of a fleet of young professionals who have the taste for more than just BMWs and old-fashioned Bloody Marys, Dora knows she must stop them from satisfying their insatiable cravings. How to cope? "All the usual stuff," Dora suggests. "Don't invite anyone into your home. You know about the garlic, and some of you are already wearing crucifixes. Swot up on your Stoker. Watch some Christopher Lee."
Above all else, Dora must use what she learned thirteen years ago to keep Violet/Rose from claiming her own eternal love: Duncan. A wicked and sassy first novel, Suckers will have readers thirsting for more from Anne Billson.