Still the Beating Heart
The
Garner’s comfortable life as a waiter in an upscale restaurant is shattered the evening that he realizes that there is something uncanny about the regular who always asks to be seated in his section. There is something different about Alonzo, something that gets past Garner’s defences and straight into his heart.
“I love the way Phillips has rethought the archetype of the vampire, insisting that they are simply variants of human form, and not supernatural. The way Garner constantly analyses the Vee community he meets is fascinating and utterly unlike anything I’ve read in this genre before. The analysis ultimately focuses on the simple question: is this person good, or bad? That’s not as simple as it might sound.”
Ulysses Grant Dietz (Paranormal Romance Guild)
Series
Call to Love (Still the Beating Heart — Book 1)
Published by JMS Books (2020)
This is the first book in a quartet of novels that grew out of the original story largely due to the richness of the created world and a desire to explore the arcs of different individual characters, their stories and their loves.
The created world is one in which “vampires” are not supernatural, but merely different — a different bio-configuration, a variant — hence the name Vee that they call themselves. The only aspect that approaches the fantastic is the idea of the gift of mental extrasensory perception possessed by some humans, who are called Sensitives.
The second book in the series is Different natures, the companion volume to Call to Love. The third book, The High Castle, and the fourth, The Golden Fire, have been outlined and are in the process of being written.
