Introducing Toni Benedetti
and her YA catalogue
Life's a Bitch... And Then You Become a Vampire
The first in a trilogy
There are vampires everywhere. This suits Rhy, a teenage vampire slayer who is good at killing the leeches. Not so much at school or at being a twin but definitely at killing vampires. It suited Will in the 1700s too: following the Great Vampire Luciano through Europe with his undead fiancé, bargaining life for property and prosperity. But all bad things must come to end. As the end of high school approaches for Rhy and her slayer-friends, Will lives as a reclusive outcast, free from, yet never free of, his old Sire. These days his one joy is in frustrating a particularly tightly wound slayer. Will’s soft-spot for Rhy brings him back into Luciano’s world, dragging her with him. If he had any sense, he would cut ties but Luciano is a master manipulator. If Rhy was more resilient she would lance them both with a pointy stick. In the end their attachment to each other ends in the worst outcome Rhy could ever imagine: becoming a vampire.
Throughout, Luciano’s underworld empire is revealed to exist on the lie that killing the sire kills the sired, the slayer’s are depleted, Will can no longer hide from his past sins, Rhy struggles to love, and an international vampire insurgency is triggered. Secondary characters, Thatcher and Statue, are introduced to become major characters in books two and three, in which Rhy’s contradictory fear of death and loyalty to the tenets of being a Slayer collide as she and the others reunite to eradicate vampires forever. Later, a distant relative resurrects the stone effigies of Will and Rhy to conquer the scientific attempts to reintroduce vampires and the promise of eternal life in the unsettlingly sterile future.
A Grim Plague
A short story interspersed with anecdotes of life in the apocalyptic United Kingdom.
Coal black patches disperse on the skin and spread until your eyes and pink tissue are all inky-black. It had a medical name, but has since been known as the Grim Plague. It spread so fast all flights were grounded. Anything already in the air was refused entry. The same of the sea. For forty years what was known as the British Isles were cut off from the rest of the world, saving billions but abandoning 68 million people. 41 million of us remain. One of whom has survived into their adulthood even with the disease – no mean feat.
Child is at constant threat of being eliminated by the Guardians because of the extent of the black patches on her pale skin. She’s also the only person who can get close enough to the outbreak sites with a camera and film, to capture evidence of prevailing outbreaks before the Guardians can cover them up. She and a rogue Guardian agent, Connor – he won’t say if it’s his first or last name - are going to reintegrate Britain with the rest of the world; Connor for the legacy and the glory, Child, for a cure.
Interspersed with micro-stories of horror, trauma and beauty in a world radically altered by disease, a commentary emerges on the notion of what it is to be human.
Bound
An arranged marriage to a werewolf of all people...
Aadi has done everything right, yet it has always ended up wrong so why fight her parent's proposal of an arranged marriage - it's been good enough for them, and a huge success for her older sister, Odette. So why is her match so dead set against it??
Despite Faolan's best efforts, she finds out he's a werewolf. How cool is that?! He grudgingly resists her less, leading her to fascinatedly follow him and his pack and straight into reckless danger. She's a weakness for Faolan and to his pack now, and a target for their rival pack - especially since Faolan was responsible for their divide. Meanwhile, as Aadi feels more and more excited about her partnership, and puts herself deeper into danger, the cracks begin to show in their families.
It all comes to a head at Odette's wedding: a bloody werewolf brawl; infidelities revealed; mother-in-laws-to-be attacking daughter-in-laws-to-be. It was bound to happen.
Running Parallel
Veronica lives the past and present simultaneously, blurring the lines between reality and fiction for her and the reader
Veronica committed a terrible crime in her youth, one which left her vulnerable to a corrupt system which sentenced her not to prison, but to a nightclub. She's thrust deep into the underworld of organised crime and abandoned there when she finds her handlers dead in their base of operations. Was it the police or the criminals that killed them and then cleaned the scene so well Veronica could hardly tell if it really happened?
Alone, she sinks deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast, and with nothing to lose she becomes an asset. Loyalties and romances are tested and twisted until the ambiguity of the truth and lies overwhelm her. She tries to burn it all to the ground; to start over.
And start over she does, from the beginning through to the fiery end quoting those terrible and wonderful moments at orderlies and doctors verbatim for readers to flick back to as they are forced to wonder if anything has been real - like Veronica does.
Red Dread Riding Hood
Red Riding Hood survived the terrible wolf, and went on to survive many magical horrors... this hood is our family's legacy and you must carry it on.
Alanis loses her family to a fire in one awful night, reuniting her with her estranged Grandmother who gives her a red riding hood and tells her the story is real, and their family have been righting wrongs since.
This is the chronicles of Alanis' journey with the Hood. First, she eradicates a dangerous magic-infused drug from this world by foolishly committing a mass-murder with the power of the Hood. This surge of magic draws attention from another world long since cut off from ours, to compete for the title of Sasyan and her life. Falling for the current Sasyan, she destroys the sacred site of the ceremony of succession, and plunges into a post-apocalyptic dystopia where she reveals the hypocritic murdering cycle of a lost creature from another world. She stops the cycle, but renders her ally's life redundant. He takes her to a well to another world, bringing her home.
These are just the first three books in the series - Alanis' story brings her great allies who become her enemies despite her best efforts; vampires, telepaths, witches and demon-faerie hybrid, and motorcycle clubs. She discovers her grandmother is a doppelganger who killed her family to get to her and recharge the Hood. The same grandmother steals Alanis' coma-born child and turns it against her. Alanis also switches bodies with a friend's child when her adventures cripple her.
It's a story of the path to Hell being laid with good intentions.