Los Angeles, 1972. Six young men dead, all in good shape, each naked -- each with a stake driven through his heart. And each with a distinctive tattoo, a Nazi army tattoo, although they are far too young to have served in World War II and have no connection with the local neo-Nazis.
The Holy Land, 1291. Ibn-al-Hassad has been making lightning raids into the principality of Galilee, killing off entire villages and fleeing before Christian forces can retaliate. Hassad, however, has not confined himself to wholesale slaughter; the bodies he leaves behind are drained of blood -- drained for their blood. Henri de Beq, leading a contingent of knights of the Order of the Sword, has learned that these creatures -- be they called afreat or vrykolatios -- can be killed in certain ways: a spear through the heart, decapitation, burning. The knights at last catch up with Hassad and his men, in the act of drinking a priest's blood from a cup -- said to have been the cup brought to the Christ at His Crucifixion. A furious de Beq vows to see the cup reconsecrated. He uses Hassad's own blood as Hassad used that of the priest; de Beq and all his men drink of it as Hassad watches and laughs his last laugh before de Beq strikes his head off.
De Beq's wounded recover surprisingly fast, but all the men suffer from a strange sickness: they must drink fresh blood to maintain their health. At last de Beq decides that he and his troops must leave the Holy Land and return to his castle in Luxembourg. The reasons that he gives are political, but in his heart he realizes there are others. The Turk Hassad has indeed had the last laugh.
The contagion is passed on again in 1944, in the Ardennes. SS Sturmbannfuhrer Wilhelm Kluge makes his way into the castle of the Order of the Sword -- a castle unmarked on the normally precise German maps. He puts together what he sees and leads an attack against the centuries-old knights, an attack in which he wounds one and deliberately drinks his blood for the power it promises.
Los Angeles, 1991. Detective Captain John Drummond, LAPD homicide, is working on a set of unsolved murders from 1972 -- as part of the matrix for his M.A. thesis in criminology. The files show evidence of a coverup, and Drummond at last gets a lead on the killer's identity: the number-one suspect in 1972 was a Father Francis Freise. With some effort, Drummond locates the old priest. Freise was there when Kluge and his men made the raid on the Castle of the Order of the Sword; he was a prisoner himself, then, and made his escape in the confusion. But decades later he saw one of the Nazis again -- working as a technician for a blood products firm and looking not a day older than he had in 1944. Freise did what he had to do, after which the archbishop and the D.A.'s office agreed that rather than have a priest swear on the Bible that he had killed six vampires, the Church would quietly put Father Freise out of the way.
Drummond has doubts about the good Father's sanity, but not as many as he might -- Freise's story reminds him of recent reports of bodies mysteriously short of blood associated with the blood products firm Euro Plasma. There is a branch in Vancouver, but the head office is in Hamburg -- where a few blood-drained bodies have recently turned up. Incidentally?
Since the 1972 cases are officially closed, Drummond must pursue matters on his own resources. Drummond travels to Europe, following two lines of inquiry. One is the blood products firm Euro Plasma. The other is the distinctive shields Freise saw in the strange knights' castle -- the coat of arms of the Order of the Sword.
Although most of Drummond's time is spent in the tedium of detective work, there's nothing tedious about Knights of the Blood. MacMillan focuses on Drummond's work as he pulls together bit after bit of evidence, but there is more: Kluge and his own forces, dealing with their various problems, like the old Jew named Stucke who remembers Kluge's face from decades before and has been trying to do something about it. And finally, there is the Order of the Sword itself, under the special protection of the church for nearly seven hundred years -- the one place help may be available for the hunting of vampires.
As the Book 1 part of the title clearly implies, this is meant to be the beginning of a series. If this first book is any indication, it will be a good one. MacMillan describes police procedure -- American and Austrian, official and unofficial -- with a telling eye for detail. His Austria is convincing, from Drummond's hosts to the autobahn. He portrays the Holy Land of 1291 with details that give it a startling immediacy. The convincingness of the whole business falters a bit with the 700-year-old knights in their castle (difficulties communicating with them suddenly disappear as exigencies of the plot take over), but by then the action is rolling so fast it's easy to overlook occasional lapses. I, for one, will be interested to see what the next book has in store.