Jane Yellowrock is unique — a shapeshifter who shares her body with a mountain lion she calls Beast, born of Cherokee heritage and raised by nuns after she was found walking naked out of the Appalachian wilderness at age twelve with no memory of her past. She makes her living hunting vampires, and her latest contract brings her to New Orleans, where a rogue vamp is killing other vampires and the city's ancient Mithran court is on edge. Jane must track a predator older and stranger than anything she has faced before — while slowly piecing together who and what she truly is.

Jane is abrasive, fiercely competent, and deeply private — a woman whose self-possession masks genuine wounds she is only beginning to understand when the series opens. She is neither invincible nor helpless, makes costly mistakes, and earns every upgrade in power and status through suffering and choice. Her bond with Beast — a consciousness that is simultaneously animal instinct and ancient entity — is unlike any other protagonist-familiar dynamic in urban fantasy.

Across fifteen books, Jane evolves from a solitary contractor operating on the margins of vampire politics to the acknowledged queen of the vampire nation of the Americas. Her found family grows to include witches, were-animals, and humans, and her relationship with her inner Beast becomes one of the series' richest ongoing threads. The series is deeply rooted in Cherokee mythology and New Orleans culture, giving it a distinctive sense of place and identity that intensifies with each successive volume.