My name is Meredith Gentry, but of course it's not my real name. I dare not even whisper my true name after dark for fear that one hushed word will travel over the night winds to the soft ear of my aunt, the Queen of the Air and Darkness. She wants me dead. I don't even know why.

I fled the high court of Faerie three years ago, and have been hiding ever since. I ran as far as the land would take me, stopped only by the shore of the Pacific Ocean, and the fact that if I'd used my passport the Bureau of Human and Fey Affairs would have been notified, and they would have told my relatives. And my relatives would have killed me. As Merry Gentry, I am a private investigator for the Grey Detective Agency: Supernatural Problems, Magical Solutions. My magical skills, which are scorned at the courts of Faerie are valued in the human world. Even by human standards, my magic isn't flashy. Fine by me: Flashy attracts too much attention, and I can't afford that. Sightings of the Princess Meredith are now more popular than Elvis sightings.

Rumor has it that I'm dead. Not quite. I am Princess Meredith NicEssus, and if you read that name after dark, you will call down a knock upon your door from a hand that can kill you with a touch. I have been so careful, but not careful enough. The shadows have found me, and they are going to take me back home, one way or another.

The running is over. The fighting has just begun . . .

Enter a thrilling, sensual world as threatening as it beautiful, replete with the consuming passions of immortal beings once worshipped as gods or demons. Full of earthly pleasures and dazzling magic, A Kiss of Shadows will hold you under its hypnotic spell.

"Hamilton takes her world by the teeth and runs with it."
--Locus

The bestselling author of "Obsidian Butterfly" is one of the hottest rising stars of dark fantasy and erotic horror. With "A Kiss of Shadows", she introduces a hot, new heroine: a Faerie princess in the modern world as we know it . . . almost.

Laurell K. Hamilton is the bestselling author of nine acclaimed Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels. She lives in Arnold, Missouri, with her husband, her daughter, two attack pugs, three birds, and a partridge in a pear tree.