WANTED: A bloodmaid of exceptional taste. Must have a keen proclivity for life's finer pleasures. Girls of weak will need not apply.. Marion Shaw is a child of the slums. Want and deprivation are all she knows. She yearns to escape the city and its miseries, but has no real hope that is until her eye is caught by a strange advertisement. Someone is seeking a 'bloodmaid'. Marion knows little of the far north - where the wealthy are said to live in luxury - but she applies for the position. Days later she finds herself at the notorious House of Hunger, and stepping into a world that is dark, debauched and very dangerous. And there, at the centre of it all, is Countess Lisavet. Loved and feared in equal measure, she presides over this hedonistic court. She is magnetic, charismatic, seductive - and she takes a special interest in Marion, who is eager to please her new mistress. But then her fellow bloodmaids begin to go missing and Marion finds herself at the centre of a vicious game of cat and mouse. She must learn the rules of her new home-and fast- or it could soon become her grave....