Breakdown

Carmilla Queen of the Night is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago's Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery they stumble on an actual corpse a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families: the grandfather of one Chaim Salanter is one of the world's wealthiest men; the mother of another Sophy Durango is the Illinois Democratic candidate for Senate. For V.I. Warshawski the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango? Or to Chaim Salanter's childhood in Nazi-occupied Lithuania? (web)