Vampires in the Temple — Mette Ivie Harrison

When Brigham Young and his Mormon pioneers entered the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, they encountered clans of homo vampirus-a small branch of the human family tree, not unlike Neanderthals-who lived along the shores of this inland sea, where they could find the minerals they needed to survive. The Mormon settlers waged war and the native homo vampirus were banished to the Great Salt Lake's only island-dubbed Vampire Island-where contact with them was carefully curated by the academics who studied them and the government officials who made sure the whole awful mess didn't run too far off plan or over budget.Flash forward almost two hundred years, and Salt Lake City police detective Jack Hardy is called out to the island to investigate the brutal murder of his fiancée. It would have been all too easy to pin the murder on a vampire, but Jack sees beyond the obvious and is drawn into a torturous maze of secret history and dark prophecy... not mention a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of the Mormon church.* * *Vampires in the Temple is the first volume in a smart new urban fantasy series, VAMPIRES & MORMONS, that will have you rethinking your assumptions about what it is that makes us human.