Half Moon Hollow

Welcome to Half-Moon Hollow, Kentucky, where the vampires buy synthetic blood at the all-night Walmart, the newly undead get a welcome casserole whether they can stomach it or not, and eternity turns out to be one long exercise in small-town gossip. This is Molly Harper's cheerfully fanged corner of the paranormal South, where being turned into a vampire is less a gothic curse than a deeply inconvenient life change — one to be survived with sarcasm, good manners, and the occasional emergency stake. The world opens on Jane Jameson, a children's librarian who is fired, mistaken for a deer and shot in a parking lot, then revived as a vampire, all in one spectacularly bad night. Her run — beginning with Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs and continuing through the "Nice Girls" novels — anchors the Hollow, but the town keeps widening to follow the neighbors: the buttoned-up daytime vampire concierge Iris Scanlon and her teenage sister Gigi, single undead mom Libby Stratton, and a rotating cast of witches, werewolves, and lovestruck bloodsuckers across a dozen-plus interlocking novels and novellas. What sets it apart is the register: this is romance played for genuine laughs, first-person and quick-witted, more concerned with awkward family dinners and workplace politics than with brooding immortals. Each spin-off stands largely on its own, but the Hollow rewards a straight walk through it. Begin at Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs; Jane's four books lay the groundwork the later couples keep tripping over.