Plot
After having faced down vampires in the previous novel, Laura Caxton is more than happy to continue her career as a trooper in the Pennsylvania State Police. Her life is upended again when Special Agent United States Federal Marshal Jameson Arkeley contacts her to help investigate the discovery of a cache of Civil War-era coffins underneath the grounds of the Gettysburg Battlefield. There are one hundred coffins in the underground crypt along with ninety-nine hearts removed from the moldering vampire bodies, but one coffin is smashed and the vampire body is missing. Hobbled by his crippled hand, Arkeley presses Caxton into service as his field operative to hunt down the missing vampire body before another horrific outbreak of vampirism infects the local population.
In a series of flashbacks told through letters, journals, and military reports it is revealed that the 150 year old vampires are the remains of a Union Army vampire corps that was used to turn the tide against the South at Gettysburg. Promised to be revived as human once a cure for vampirism was found, the soldiers were imprisoned in their tomb and were almost immediately forgotten by their commanders. The archeologist who discovers the tomb uses the vampires in a plot for his own personal gain.
With Arkeley crippled by injuries and age, he finally resolves that the best way to stop this new outbreak of vampirism is to allow himself to become one, having vampire Justina Malvern turn him so that he can defeat the awakened vampires himself. He informs Caxton that he will return to her so that she can kill him once he has completed his task, but fails to return once the sun rises, forcing Caxton to acknowledge that her mentor has become what he once hunted, leaving her resolved to find and stop him.
Read more about this topic: 99 Coffins
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)