"Vampiric Vacation" by Kiersten White

Vampiric Vacation (Sept. 27, 2022) by Kiersten White.

*This is the second novel in a series.*

The Sinister-Winterbottom children have traded in Fathoms of Fun for the Sanguine Spa in the Little Transylvania Mountains. Aunt Saffronia drops them off with vague instructions to “look closer” and “find what was lost.” After 16-year-old Wil almost walks herself off a cliff while staring intently at Rodrigo, her phone, the youth encounter Mina, who has unexpected outbursts directed at the ceiling. There’s also a disembodied voice and dreams of Lucy, Mina’s mysterious younger sister, who’s just gone. Or is she? Sanguine Spa’s owner is known as the Count, a cold, intimidating man with red, red lips, and he’s in partnership with a child called Quincy, who’s excellent at lassoing, and which Theo believes she must learn how to do (along with rappelling and lock-picking, because new life skills). The Count and Quincy separate the kids from the adults and send them on a scavenger hunt, giving Theo and Alexander good opportunity to snoop around. The Sanguine Spa is an eerie place with the Count, Mina’s odd outbursts, suspiciously red drinks for the adults, locked doors and vampire bats. What’s really going on, and who is Van H?

            The second gothic, spooky-but-not-really summer adventure in the Sinister Summer series is another fast-moving middle-grade novel of flippancy and fun. There are spa guests laid out like corpses, a cave full of bats (and their guano, “because bat poop was so fancy it even had its own name”) and a villainous appearance by someone the Sinister-Winterbottoms encountered at the water park. Fully immersed readers will want to have read the first in the series to connect clues in this clever and entertaining story with quirky characters. This eerie escapade is delightfully devious, but also cheekily charming. It is another wonderfully weird story from White. Next stop: summer camp in a “mountainous lake region.” (There is a book in Sanguine Spa’s library tiled A History of Summer Camps and the Unexplained Disappearances of Various Campers in the Mountainous Lake Regions. Coincidence?)

            Book 1: Wretched Waterpark