SERIES CONCEPT

The Valensi Chronicles is a dark, emotionally complex paranormal series that reimagines the vampire mythology through the lens of near-immortality, loyalty, betrayal, and the cost of choosing between institutional duty and personal conscience. Set against a backdrop of hidden supernatural hierarchies and emerging human awareness, the series follows a cast of unforgettable characters as they navigate a world where the rules of near-immortality are about to be rewritten.

SERIES OVERVIEW

Setting:

A world where an ancient Valensi (vampire) hierarchy has ruled from the shadows for millennia, maintaining secrecy through centuries of careful control. Their perfect masquerade is cracking. Humans are discovering them. Organizations are hunting them. And the supernatural world itself is fracturing along ideological lines—those who believe in hiding and those who believe in resistance.

Core Tension:

The series explores a fundamental conflict: Can loyalty to institution coexist with personal morality? What happens when the rules you've lived by for centuries suddenly demand you become the monster you've always fought against?

Tone:

Literary paranormal fiction with psychological depth. Character-driven. Morally complex. Steeped in consequence. The series blends intimate emotional journeys with epic stakes, grounding high-concept supernatural conflict in deeply human (and superhuman) dilemmas.

BOOK ONE: WAIF

The Fall from Grace

Tagline:From street waif to elite protector to hunted exile — one woman's journey proves that the highest loyalty sometimes demands the deepest betrayal.

Story:At 135 years old, Paris has lived an extraordinary life as one of the Valensi hierarchy's most trusted warriors. But in a single moment of loyalty to her oldest friend, she commits the unforgivable crime: killing a fellow Protector. Now hunted by the organization she's served for over a century, Paris must flee into exile, pursued by the only man she's ever loved.

The Heart:A meditation on chosen family, the weight of institutional power, and the discovery that sometimes protecting what you love means destroying everything you've built. Through flashbacks spanning decades—from a terrified street child to an elite warrior to a woman finally brave enough to love—we witness how a lifetime of sacrifice can be shattered by a single choice.

Why Readers Will Connect:

· A deeply flawed protagonist who isn't seeking redemption, just survival

· A love story woven through centuries that defies easy categorization

• Moral complexity without convenient resolutions

· A protagonist who was raised to kill and chooses to save

· The emotional devastation of betrayal, both personal and institutional

Ideal Readers:Fans of character-driven paranormal fiction, vampire mythology reimagined, emotional complexity over action sequences, stories exploring loyalty and betrayal (comparable to The Poppy War, Six of Crows, Interview with the Vampire)

BOOK TWO: WIDOW

The Choice Between Worlds

Tagline:When the hunter becomes the hunted, a woman must choose between her own kind and her own conscience—and neither choice comes without blood.

Story:Brianna Van Demir has spent twelve centuries building a perfectly ordinary life. As a Valensi with impressive sun immunity (she's a Solari), she's mastered invisibility, working as a prosecutor in Charlotte while hiding her true nature. But when a mysterious caller reveals that a killer on her case might be the same monster who murdered the love of her life centuries ago, everything unravels.

Then she meets an organization that offers her a seductive alternative: join a covert agency dedicated to maintaining balance between human and supernatural worlds through surveillance, strategic intervention, and carefully calibrated violence. They're offering her purpose. They're asking her to turn against her own kind.

The Heart:A story about the moral weight of becoming what you fear. Brianna must navigate the impossible: protect the humans she's lived among, save the woman she now loves, and confront the organization hunting her kind—all while deciding which side of an inevitable war she's willing to die for.

Why Readers Will Connect:

· A female protagonist with complex power and vulnerability

· The seductive danger of joining a cause you believe in

· Forbidden love that transcends species and mortality

· Moral ambiguity: neither Valensi nor human organization is purely good or evil

· The personal cost of choosing principle over loyalty

· A new Valensi POV learning what near-immortality really means

Ideal Readers:Fans of The Expanse, The Ministry for the Future, paranormal noir, morally complex thrillers, stories exploring institutional corruption and personal agency

BOOK THREE: WITCH

Open War

Tagline:The masquerade is over. In a world where human and Valensi no longer hide from each other, old alliances shatter and new ones form in the darkness before dawn.

Story:The carefully constructed world of hidden supernatural societies is collapsing. An organization called HAWTHORN has moved from covert surveillance to open conflict, discovering the ability of eliminating Valensi with methodical precision. The hierarchy is fractured. Rogue hunters are escalating. The Garou are mobilizing. And in San Diego's underground supernatural community, a fierce Irish club owner, a young Valensi still learning her powers, and a former Protector must decide whether to run or fight.

The Heart:War isn't theoretical anymore. It's personal. It's messy. It's already here. The series culminates in a story about the bonds we forge in crisis, the communities we build in response to threat, and the possibility of resistance when the old order crumbles.

Why Readers Will Connect:

· Ensemble cast of complex, underestimated characters

· Intersectional supernatural conflict (Valensi, Garou, humans all with competing interests)

· The mythology deepens: readers discover more about the hidden histories and power structures

• Characters from previous books converge

· High-stakes action grounded in character consequence

· The question: what comes after the masquerade ends?

Ideal Readers:Fans of epic paranormal series, ensemble casts, books exploring power structures and resistance (American Gods, Ninth House), readers invested in the emotional threads established in books one and two

COMPANION WORKS

BLOOD AND AMBER: A Novella

When Obsession Becomes near-immortal

Tagline:Two centuries of running. One night of reckoning. A love so twisted it becomes indistinguishable from madness.

Story:Detective Sean Byrne never expected his routine homicide case to crack open the supernatural world hiding beneath Dallas. But when a supposedly famous, mysterious man named Damon Gables walks into his investigation and claims to be over 200 years old, everything Byrne knows about the world shatters. Together with a hunter named Greeley, Byrne must navigate a decades-old vendetta between two near-immortal beings—a predator consumed by possessive obsession and a man desperate to end the cycle of violence before more innocents die.

The Heart:This is a standalone novella that serves as both an introduction to the Valensi world and a bridge between WIDOW and WITCH (the second and third novels in the series). It's the story of how humans discover the supernatural hierarchy exists, told through the lens of a police detective learning that monsters are real and the only thing that can stop them sometimes requires the sacrifice of the very people trying to save you.

Why Readers Will Connect:

· A non-Valensi POV that grounds the series in recognizable reality

• The moment when the masquerade cracks open

· A love story so toxic it becomes a murder-suicide pact

· Themes of obsession, ownership, and the difference between love and predation

· The introduction of HAWTHORN and Madronite ammunition that drive the series forward

• A complete emotional arc within a shorter format
• Noir-influenced tone with paranormal elements

Standalone Value:The novella works perfectly as a standalone paranormal thriller for readers not yet committed to the trilogy. It has a complete arc, high stakes, and emotional resolution while leaving larger questions about the Valensi world unanswered.

ONE NIGHT IN HOLLYWOOD: A Short Story

The Past Has Teeth

Tagline:Four centuries of hiding in plain sight. One moment of genuine connection. A debt that refuses to stay buried.

Story:Trip is a 400-year-old Valensi who's spent fifty years building a perfect life in Los Angeles, blending seamlessly into Hollywood's glittering darkness. But at a party filled with beautiful, meaningless people, he meets Greta—a woman with bright blue hair and a dangerously familiar look of someone running from something. She's Elizabeth Townsend, and she's a fugitive from Valensi society, hunted for killing a Protector in self-defense nearly a century ago.

What begins as a tentative conversation becomes an unexpected connection between two ancient beings who've been carrying loneliness for centuries. But when a Protector named Alexei tracks Elizabeth to Los Angeles and confronts them both on a dark Hollywood street, the illusion of safety shatters. Trip must decide whether to protect someone he barely knows or preserve the anonymity he's fought so hard to maintain.

The Heart:A story about the desperate hunger for genuine connection in a life measured in centuries. ONE NIGHT IN HOLLYWOOD is set in the contemporary world and shows what happens when two Valensi fugitives find each other in the darkness—not through destiny or design, but through the simple, revolutionary act of being honest about who they are. It's about the courage required to risk everything for someone when you've already learned that everything can be taken away.

Why Readers Will Connect:

· A 400-year-old protagonist too bored to care about his own safety

· Two broken near-immortals recognizing each other across centuries of damage

• A fight scene that is both visceral and personal

· Themes of loneliness, the exhaustion of hiding, and the cost of genuine connection

· A non-heteronormative romance that emerges naturally from shared vulnerability

• Perfect paranormal noir pacing and atmosphere

· The bittersweet recognition that sometimes meeting the right person comes exactly when survival is no longer enough

Standalone Value:Completely satisfying as a standalone paranormal short story—a self-contained moment of connection and danger that doesn't require prior knowledge of the trilogy. However, series readers will recognize deeper thematic echoes: the same institutional brutality that hunts Paris hunts Elizabeth; the same courage that defines Daphne defines Elizabeth; the same weariness that ages Brianna ages Trip. The story becomes a crystallized meditation on themes central to the entire Valensi Chronicles.

HOW THESE STORIES WORK TOGETHER

Reading Order (Recommended for New Readers):

· Start with BLOOD AND AMBER if you want to dive directly into the series and understand the Valensi world through a human detective's perspective

· Start with WAIF if you prefer to begin with the trilogy proper and encounter the novella as rich context after

· Read ONE NIGHT IN HOLLYWOOD anytime—it's contemporary and parallel to the main events, enriching understanding of Valensi society without requiring prior knowledge

Chronological Timeline (Story Events):

· All five works exist in the same contemporary timeline:

· WAIF (begins in present but covers 135 years, Paris becomes fugitive)

· BLOOD AND AMBER (Dallas - the masquerade cracks open to humans)

· WIDOW (Charlotte - institutional corruption and personal choice)

· ONE NIGHT IN HOLLYWOOD (Los Angeles - parallel contemporary events)

· WITCH (multi-location - possible open war between humans and Valensi)

The Complete Picture:

Together, these five works create a rich, multi-layered mythology unfolding in real time across North America. The novella cracks open the masquerade and shows how humans and Valensi collide in Dallas. The short story reveals how that same collision reverberates through Los Angeles, where ancient beings face the same institutional brutality from different angles. The trilogy explores the political and personal fallout from the masquerade's exposure and imagines what happens when the hidden world can no longer hide, escalating from personal exile to open war.

SERIES STRENGTHS

1. Unflinching Character Complexity

The Valensi Chronicles refuses easy answers. Heroes make terrible choices. Villains have comprehensible motivations. The series explores what it means to be trapped between competing loyalties, all of them legitimate.

2. Earned Emotional Impact

Decades of backstory, carefully woven across each novel, mean that character moments land with genuine weight. We've watched these people survive centuries; their pain is real.

3. Unique Vampire Mythology

The Valensi aren't romanticized—they're predators with institutional complexity. The introduction of sun-immunity variants (the Solari) and the emergence of HAWTHORN creates fresh tension in an often-familiar genre.

4. Literary Quality

This is paranormal fiction that reads like literary fiction. The prose is elegant. The psychological exploration is deep. Readers won't just turn pages—they'll find themselves thinking about these characters long after finishing.

5. Escalating Stakes

Each book expands the scope: book one is intimate and personal; book two widens to include institutional corruption and moral compromise; book three explodes into open conflict. The architecture is intentional and rewarding.

6. Female Agency

The protagonists—Paris, Brianna, and the ensemble of book three—are powerful women making impossible choices. None of them are passive. All of them carry consequences.

CORE THEMES ACROSS THE SERIES

· Loyalty vs. Conscience: When institutional duty conflicts with personal morality, which wins?

· near-immortality's Cost: What does it mean to live for centuries? What gets lost? What gets distorted?

· Found Family vs. Biological/Institutional Family: The bonds we choose vs. the bonds we're born into

· The Masquerade's End: What happens when the hidden world is revealed?

· Power and Its Corruption: How do systems maintain control? What happens when they're questioned?

· Love as Defiance: In a world built on hierarchy and control, love becomes revolutionary

COMPARABLE TITLES & POSITIONING

If readers love Six of Crows (morally complex characters, found family, heist-like tension) → They'll love the character dynamics and moral complexity of WAIF

If readers love Interview with the Vampire (vampire mythology, psychological depth, sexual tension) → They'll love the emotional richness and forbidden romance of WIDOW

If readers love The Expanse (institutional conflict, character-driven sci-fi, ensemble casts) → They'll love the political complexity and escalating stakes across the series

If readers love American Gods (hidden supernatural world, resistance to power structures) → They'll love the mythology and the war narrative of WITCH

Market Position:

Premium paranormal fiction for readers who've aged out of YA supernatural romance and want complex, literary explorations of power, loyalty, and near-immortality. Appeals to readers of both literary fiction and genre paranormal. Strong crossover potential to fantasy and sci-fi audiences.

THE VALENSI CHRONICLES
Where near-immortal beings confront mortality's greatest question—what are we willing to sacrifice for what we love?

Complete Works:

• ONE NIGHT IN HOLLYWOOD (Short Story)
• BLOOD AND AMBER (Novella)
• WAIF (Novel)
• WIDOW (Novel)
• WITCH (Novel)