They divide their time between chateaus, posh London flats and stately homes in Venice. Like their counterparts in much contemporary paranormal fiction, these are 1 percent vampires: affluent, educated at Ivy League schools and Oxbridge, employed as hedge fund managers and financiers. They also eschew blood, except in very small doses in a consensual setting. These vampires eschew public transportation, but maybe that’s for the best. You definitely don’t want to tick off a vampire behind the wheel of a Range Rover or piloting a private jet or power boat. He intends to extract supernatural DNA from the Book of Life and sequence it in an effort to discover a cure for his disorder. Matthew suffers from an inherited condition called blood rage, which he fears may be passed on to the twins that the pregnant Diana is carrying. Diana and Matthew desperately want to find the Book of Life, that ancient, magical manuscript that, literally, contains the history of the earth’s supernatural creatures: The book’s parchment pages are made from the skin of witches, vampires and daemons. I’ve read both previous books and still found myself frantically trying to remember who was who after encountering more than a dozen characters - most of them related by blood or marriage - in the first four pages. Newcomers to this saga would do best to start with the first volume, “A Discovery of Witches.” Harkness’s new novel begins in medias res, as the couple find themselves at the center of an informal and slightly contentious family reunion at Matthew’s ancestral chateau.

They’d gone there in search of the alchemical manuscript officially designated Ashmole 782 but known to discerning witches, vampires and daemons as the Book of Life. When last encountered in “Shadow of Night,” Diana and her husband, aristo vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, had just landed back in the 21st century after a sojourn in Elizabethan England.

Time-tripping witch and scholar Diana Bishop returns in “ The Book of Life,” the final installment of Deborah Harkness’s best-selling “All Souls” trilogy.

The book of life all souls trilogy