Blog Tour Guest Post: The Impaler's Wife by Autumn Bardot

Please join me in welcoming Autumn Bardot to Let Them Read Books! Autumn is touring the blogosphere with her newest release, The Impaler's Wife, and I'm thrilled to have her here today with a guest post about danger, desire, and Dracula! Read on and enter to win a paperback copy of The Impaler's Wife!

Legend, history, and passion collide in this gritty, evocative, and sensual story about history’s most notorious price and the woman who paid love’s ultimate price.

The year is 1464, and young King Matthias controls Hungary, his family, and the fate of the world’s most notorious political prisoner, Prince Vlad Dracula.

Ilona Szilágy, the king’s cousin, is young and ambitious. Dracula is determined to marry into the Hunyadi family. It is love at first sight…but the king has other plans. The Impaler Prince, however, never takes no for an answer.

This begins Ilona’s journey into the treacherous world of court intrigues, family betrayals, and her husband’s dark desires. Eager to become Vlad’s trusted confidant, Ilona soon discovers that marriage to a man tortured by his past comes with a price.

Woven throughout is a peek into the life and times of one of the world’s most enigmatic and maligned rulers…the man before the legend.

With Bardot’s decadent period detail and a cast of gritty evocative characters, The Impaler’s Wife offers a fierce yet sensuous glimpse into the violent 15th century.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON AND BARNES AND NOBLE

Danger, Desire, and Dracula

by Autumn Bardot

Hi Let Them Read Books followers!

A big thank you to Jenny for hosting THE IMPALER’S WIFE and letting me dish about danger, desire, and Dracula. Those three words just naturally go together, don’t they?

I’m a sucker for the medieval period. Mind you, I have zero desire to actually go back in time and live there—I’d probably end up a scullery maid instead of a princess. Novels, Netflix, Renaissance fairs, museum exhibits—I adore them all. I even follow an IG account that posts all things medieval. Much of my online visual inspiration is on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/autumnbardot/.  I confess, researching the time period was fascinating, exhausting, and often bloodcurdling. Which brings us to the first topic…

DANGER!

Admit it, we love stories about bad boys. And Vlad the Impaler is the ultimate bad boy. But it wasn’t Prince Vlad that gave me the idea for the novel. Several years ago, I bought a fun book about little-known women in history. Each page had a sketch and a sassy short blurb. One of those women was Ilona, Dracula’s Hungarian wife. The blurb portrayed Dracula as the stereotypical evil prince. That bugged me because Dracula is a hero in Romania. The muse smacked me upside my head and that’s when I knew I had to write about Dracula’s wife. And from her perspective as a naïve, smitten, and ambitious young woman. It was risky. Readers expect anything with Dracula to be about bloodsucking vampires. I tracked down and purchased an out-of-print book from the foremost Dracula experts and was blown away. His early life was tragic and horrific, yet, unfortunately, all too common for an heir apparent during the medieval ages.

I portray the man through two lenses, that of history and that of the woman who loves him. Oddly enough, as I delved into Dracula’s world, the more Ilona’s character crystalized.