The first book in Vivian Shaw’s Dr. Greta Helsing series, Strange Practice, was released in 2017. I’m somewhat surprised that it’s managed to fly under my radar for so long (seriously, how had I never even heard of these books before?), as pretty much immediately after reading the blurb on the back of the book I decided that this was something I wanted to read.
Dr. Greta Helsing (a descendant of the famous vampire slayer, the family dropped the ‘Van’ part of the name at some point after relocating to England) is a medical doctor to the “differently living” (aka the undead), including all manner of vampires, vampyres, ghouls, mummies, and other things that go bump in the night. When her friend Lord Edmund Ruthven (a vampire, also a character previously fictionalized in a 19th Century gothic novel) calls her to treat a patient that has been attacked, she learns that the attacks have been targeting other undead creatures, and becomes involved in an investigation to determine the source of the attacks and stop them.
This was a very fast read (I think I finished it in less than a day), and an utter delight. The relationships between Greta and her friends, colleagues, and patients were well developed, and the whole book had a sort of cozy-but-macabre vibe that I really connected with. There’s also tons of little references to other gothic novels (as well as more recent cultural references), which were fun to spot. It wasn’t perfect—the central mystery wasn’t the most compelling, but overall it was a really good time and I’m definitely going to pick up the rest of the books in the series.