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Pale Guardian by Barbara Hambly. The seventh book in the James Asher series, which stars an ex-spy/current Oxford linguistics professor; his wife Lydia, a former heiress who renounced Society in order to become a medical researcher; and their buddy/more than platonic third partner/monster they've both sworn to kill, Don Simon Ysidro, a 400 year old Spanish aristocrat and vampire.

The previous book, Darkness on his Bones, ended with the opening shots of WWI. In Pale Guardian it's now 1915 and Lydia has volunteered as a front-line nurse (her own research and expertise on X-rays not counting for much, as a woman) placing her in the trenches of northeastern France. Also with her is pretty much every single vampire from Europe or further abroad; why bother putting themselves in danger by hunting back home when they can easily hang out on the front lines and eat some of the hundreds or thousands of soldiers dying daily? Ysidro is also there, having promised to protect Lydia. James remains back home in Oxford, recovering from pneumonia.

Ysidro, Lydia, and James all separately encounter revenants – a form of zombie-like undead that's as dangerous to vampires as to humans – and as they investigate their origins, begin to fear that the British government is planning to use the revenants as a weapon of war. Which is horrifying enough, even without the extremely likely possibility that things will go wrong and the revenants will overrun London, Paris, or the whole world. Whether ends do justify their means is a major theme, and not only in regards to the scientist eventually revealed to be leading the revenant project. Lydia is constantly forced to examine her own reliance on and regard for Ysidro, who after all is killing humans nightly and psychically manipulating others to enable his lifestyle. Just because he's always been kind to her and they have a special understanding doesn't erase that reality.

I've enjoyed all of the Asher series, but Pale Guardian is a real high point. The descriptions of the trenches are vivid and horrifying, the cold immorality of the governments conducting WWI contrasts wonderfully with the vampires, and the climatic action sequence (in the underground chambers of a former convent) is full of absolutely delicious angst and desperation and last-minute rescues. And also a vampire on a motorcycle. I'm pretty sure Hambly is conscious of the ridiculous potential of her genres and occasionally choses to indulges in it, for which I love her.

In short: WWI, vampires, mad scientists, spies, and evil government agencies. What more could you want out of a book?

Prisoner of Midnight by Barbara Hambly. The eight book in the James Asher series. At the end of the previous book, Pale Guardian, Lydia swore that she never wanted to see Ysidro again and that she didn't want him secretly guarding her. Two years later, at the opening of Prisoner of Midnight, she is contacted by him in a dream, leading to a crisis of conscience. As she writes to Jamie:
Don Simon is a prisoner, somewhere. The dreams that I have had were unclear – uncharacteristically unclear – but I sense, I KNOW, that he is being held captive, in terrible and continuous pain. If he were not, he would not have asked for my help – as he did, as he is. His voice, crying out of darkness, was broken up, like fragments of a torn manuscript. The only words that were clear were, ‘City of Gold’.
The American liner SS City of Gold leaves Southampton on Wednesday, for New York.

Luckily, Lydia's extremely wealthy and extremely obnoxious aunt, Lady Mountjoy, has already booked a first-class suite on that very City of Gold. Lydia agrees to take the voyage with her, despite two immense problems: A) she's not actually sure what she should do if she manages to find Ysidro – free him or kill him, which would at least put him out of his misery while also stopping him from killing future humans, and B) in 1917 passenger liners are frequently targeted by German submarines, meaning everyone might end up dead on the bottom of the ocean before she solves the first problem.

Lydia fairly quickly discovers Ysidro's captor, who turns out to be millionaire industrialist Spenser Cochran. Cochran's plan for a pet vampire is to have him kill strikers and miners and all those other annoying poor who demand their so-called rights. Unfortunately the who is less complicated than the how; Conchran has injected Ysidro with some sort of painful poison, part scientific and part alchemical to suit a vampiric nature, which requires daily antidotes to keep him alive. Ysidro's escape, therefore, is not a matter of unlocking a door, but of figuring out the composition of both drugs and stealing or creating a new supply.

Which is James's job. Stuck back in Europe, due to a combination of not having time to reach the SS City of Gold before its departure and his obligations to Britain's wartime government, he nevertheless manages to communicate with Lydia via telegram. With the help of various French and English vampires (who hate the idea of such a poison existing), he sets out to find who made the drugs and ultimately get a copy of the research notes into Lydia's hands.

Matters get even more complicated when several third-class passengers on the ship turn up dead and drained of blood. Is Ysidro somehow killing them with no memory of it, due to the poison? Is there a second vampire on board? Will an innocent third-class passenger be blamed for the murders, since "a vampire did it!" isn't a valid alibi? Lydia investigates, with the sort-of help of Cochran (who believes two pet vampires would be even better than one pet vampire), third-class passenger and anarchist Georg Heller (who absolutely believes vampires don't exist and the whole thing is probably a conspiracy to keep the poor man down), and first-class passenger and elderly Russian Princess Natalia Nikolaievna Gromyko (who believes in vampires and that they are best contacted through the Astral Plane).

Whew, there's a lot going on in this book. But it all works! The Titanic (1997)-esque feel of a grand passenger liner as a microcosm of society, the contrast between the glittering upper levels and packed steerage beneath, is excellent. Ysidro's constant pain and woe are straight-up stoic woobie fuel, for those of you who love their favorite characters most when they're suffering. (I am totally one of those people.) I also really adored the resolution to the third-class murders. There's a twist at the end that I'm not so sure about, but I'm willing to wait and see where Hambly goes from here. On the other hand, the ending does potentially suggest that the next book might be set in NYC, which I would LOVE.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.