After purchasing a box of braille diaries, a young widow, compelled to know their meaning, hires a blind boy to translate and discovers the unusual reason they're in braille and that they recall the memories of a passenger, claiming to be a vampire, who traveled to America onboard the Mayflower and is now closer to her than she could ever imagine

SYNOPSIS:

Living a life of self-imposed loneliness since her husband's savage murder three years earlier, Grace Winslow finds solace in her lively pregnant neighbor, Kristin, and Myra, an elderly woman nearing her final days. Guarding her emotions, meeting a man is the farthest thing from Grace's mind as she makes it through another cold winter until spring, when she ventures to a thrift store to make a donation and happens upon a box of ornate old books written in braille. With an urgency that even surprises her, Grace purchases the books and hires Bryce, a blind teen, to translate the books, which turn out to be diaries ranging in dates from the 1600s to the early 1930s.

This vast time discrepancy is soon explained as Bryce comes to a passage where he and Grace discover the author claims to be a vampire who traveled aboard the Mayflower with his younger "Castrati" brother to escape persecution from King Louis XIII.

Grace, intrigued with the diaries even before the vampire revelation, is now interested in them to the point of obsession, paying Bryce to read and reread them to her several times a week. Bryce, living with an abusive father, is happy to be away from his terrible home life. He finds himself especially interested in a passage from the diaries that tells of a blind man regaining his sight after becoming one of the "undead". New neighbors purchase the deserted house next door to Grace. A handsome man and his moody younger brother Dominic move into the house and Grace meets Austin, the older of the two. Having an almost instant electric attraction for each other, Grace and Austin seem oblivious to all else around them, much to Kristin's concern, while further readings of the diaries reveal disturbing similarities to Austin and Dominick, who are, in fact, the vampires from the diaries and have been watching Grace since the night of her husband's death.

Dominic, resentful and jealous of Austin's relationship with Grace, vowed to Austin years before never to make another of their "kind"—now sets out to create a new "family" and give in to his natural instinct to kill and “make” others. Austin, “pretending” to be mortal, courts Grace, trying to keep his unbearable secret from her until it's revealed that Dominic, who has watched Kristen's pregnancy with a keen interest, has done the unthinkable. This turn of events forces the truth out, leaving Grace with a terrible decision that she soon acts on. But Bryce, abused and powerless before, has unknowingly thwarted her plans, ensuring the continuation of the vampires reign.

NIGHT MUST FALL