Dive into a new swashbuckling standalone adventure in Solaris’ Vampires of Dumas universe from Sunday Times bestselling author of historical fantasy Kate Heartfield!

For two days and three nights, Françoise de Montesquiou d’Artagnan has slept, trapped in a strange dream of a shifting world of spirits. Everyone in the dream is clad in the forms of animals, including Françoise herself, and they are discussing secret affairs of monsters and princes – until a host of vampires attacks them in the dream. A man with a beautiful voice faces them down, telling her to run.

Françoise wakes in her grave, buried by her grieving parents and abandoned by her fiancé – and determined to find the man who’d saved her life, identifiable only by his voice. She flees to Paris and finds people like her: the Benandanti, born in their cauls, and blessed with the gift to enter the spirit realm in dreams. She learns that the vampires who attacked her in spirit are a threat in the waking world – and that they sit in the highest positions in the land. Only she and her new brothers and sisters can bring them down.

The Swordmaster is due for release from Solaris on 10th September 2026, you can pre-order your copy here

The cover designer is Sam Gretton.

Kate Heartfield is the award-winning author of several historical fantasy novels, including The Tapestry of Time, about clairvoyant sisters in WWII; The Valkyrie, a retelling of Norse and Germanic legends; and the Sunday Times bestseller The Embroidered Book, about Marie Antoinette and her sister Maria Carolina. She has also written interactive fiction, and Assassin’s Creed novels. Her forthcoming titles are Mercutio (May 2026, HarperVoyager) and The Swordmaster (September 2026, Solaris). Kate is a former journalist who lives in Ottawa, Canada with a black cat named Minerva.

The Swordmaster is due for release from Solaris on 10th September 2026, you can pre-order your copy here