Valerius Drakenfeld has survived nearly six centuries, several wars, one catastrophic betrayal, and the indignity of working in vampire customer service.
He will not survive an audit. Probably.
When a certified raven delivers notice from the Bureau of Eternal Compliance, Valerius and his household have twenty-one mortal days to prove that every undead resident, territorial claim, financial arrangement, and supernatural irregularity is properly documented.
It is not.
Zach, the household’s youngest vampire, may not legally exist. Ambrose remembers nine hundred years of history but rarely the century currently required. The House has opinions, grudges, and a regrettable tendency to weaponize the shrubbery. And somewhere inside the Bureau, someone has been waiting a very long time for Valerius’s records to fail.
Their only hope is Amelia Harker: a mortal paralegal armed with a pencil, an exacting respect for procedure, and the dangerous belief that every account can be reconciled.
But as missing files surface and old betrayals acquire new signatures, Amelia begins to understand that this is no ordinary audit.
The vampires have secrets. The Bureau has procedures. Amelia has a checklist.
GOD HELP THE BUREAU.
Available September 21, 2026
READER DISPATCH
★★★★★
“I’ve just finished this book. 5 ⭐ I started reading this morning and couldn’t put it down. If you like dry wit, vampires, and the (slightly) absurd, this book is a DO NOT MISS. (It’s also on Kobo!)”
— @j_ayelle on Threads
AMY WILEY
Amy Wiley writes fiction about power, memory, and the complicated distance between what happened and what gets remembered — sometimes seriously, and sometimes with vampires filling out compliance paperwork.
A respiratory therapist by profession, she has spent more than twenty years working in critical care, where she learned that human beings are rarely at their simplest when the stakes are highest. That understanding follows her into her fiction: characters are allowed to be contradictory, imperfect, frightened, resilient, and occasionally spectacularly bad at doing the sensible thing.
Her work ranges from historical fiction to satirical fantasy, but returns again and again to questions of survival, identity, and who gets to tell the story afterward.
When she isn't writing, Amy lives and travels in a renovated motorhome with two cats, too many books, and an enduring tendency to become obsessed with dead people and then research them extensively.
COMING SOON FROM AMY WILEY
Everything I Could Carry
At forty-three, Willie Bennet has become very good at leaving. A battered motorhome offers her one more escape—until the life she builds on the road asks whether freedom might mean finally choosing to stay.
A novel about starting over, making a home, and deciding what is worth carrying.
News from beyond the gate.
New releases, launch updates, and the occasional raven-delivered notice.
JOIN THE BRIAR GATE CIRCULAR
Join the Briar Gate Circular for Everything I Could Carry release news, sneak peeks, and updates from Amy Wiley.