Thank you to NetGalley and to Crooked Lane Books for the ARC of The Vampire of Kings Street by Asha Greyling.

This is a solid debut cozy 19th century mystery based in New York. Our main character is lawyer Radhika Dhingra, a now orphaned young woman of Indian parents, trying to get her law firm off the ground in a time of racism and sexism. When she is the last choice for a desperate vampire worried he will be accused of murder, Radhika steps up to try and help. When the murder actually does occur and Radhika is removed from the case, she continues to attempt to solve the murder on her own.

In this version of our world, vampires are mainly house servants and considered a detriment/fearsome element to polite society. They own nothing and are reliant upon their family sponsors for all ability to remain alive and safe. Radhika, also an outsider based on her race, her gender and her single status, has sympathy and empathy even in the face of fear or danger. It is easy to make the connections between the place of both in a world that is blatantly obvious in its rejection of beings that are different.

The mystery in the book is fast paced, but I feel like we never dive deeply into Radhika or Evelyn. Perhaps it's that the motivations for both seem a bit opaque as the story progresses. We spend the entirety of the novel with Radhika and we meet her acquaintances, but even though she knows many people she also seems to be utterly alone in all things. I wish we had seen more introspection on that or more scenes of what friends she does have - like her time in the college or how she came to have a friend as a reporter (are they even friends?). We have a whole chunk of the book that is a flashback for Evelyn, but without it being fully absorbed by Radhika it is difficult to tell how it affects and impacts her. With the book being fast paced and shorter, it makes sense why it doesn't have this - it's just something that I wish we saw more of.

The book summary mentioned comparisons to Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate, Rebecca Roanhorse's Tread of Angels, and Deanna Raybourn's Veronica Speedwell. I think those are all very light comparisons (and not in a negative way!). Carriger has vampires, but is too comical in tone and has a lot more romance elements; Roanhorse is the opposite - Tread of Angels is actually pretty dark, and Greyling's work is just more serious than anything, and Raybourn isn't paranormal - just written in the same time period. Maybe sort of similar to JR Dawson's The First Bright Thing? I must have read something that would make more sense here, but it's not quite coming to mind.

Such a good book omg!!!! The feels I got during this book omg. So so amazing. This plot is perfect and I rated it 5 stars.

I've read a lot of vampire books and this was a pretty different take. I really enjoyed that the author didn't make them like the leaders in the world or whatever but something as simple as a housekeeper.