Stanley, J: Blood Runner

★Book Excellence Award 2017 Fantasy Finalist★ In 3213 BCE Sumer, the Great Mountain, Enlil, banishes his sister, Ninlil, to the Netherworld for taking her temple priest as consort. But her Kurshram fights a life-sacrificing way through the flaming palace to trade his soul to free her. A thousand years later, a dark deed wakes his dead, empty flesh... Richard can't die. And he's a monster. Maybe. Sullen, and sarcastic, he's a soul divided. A healer by trade, a conflicting blood-stealing curse drives him slowly mad while people keep showing up for help. Mostly? He wants to be left alone. And that's just not working out. In eighteenth century Britain, injured, conscience-stirring Maggie falls across his threshold to challenge everything he believes is true. Until vicious pirate captain, Billy the Blackdeath, with a secret as old as his own, tangles them up in an inhuman vendetta that puts his unkempt scruples to the test. In the solitude of a remote Canadian forest in the present day, to his undying exasperation he learns everyone is looking for him--the living and the undead--while fate seems determined to serve him up existence in unexplainable harmony with people he doesn't know. When the truth comes out, it smacks of supernal collusion and though Richard protests he's nobody's hero, a manic, all-consuming need to protect human and not-so-human explodes into a fiery five-thousand-year-old destiny of epic, mythological proportion.