(Note: This letter contains spoilers for Westminster (North County Paranormal Unit 15), publishing September 5, 2026, as well as previous books in the series.)

I already wrote over on Patreon about my preteen love of all things Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So I won’t go deep into that over here. But it was exciting to finally write the vampire story. It’s a series about paranormal investigators, there needs to be vampires at some point, right? And don’t worry, though I doubt you will, based on the ending of this one. There will be more vampires in the future. And if they aren’t showcased in the main series to the extent they were in Westminster, then look for them in side stories. Because the vampire situation in New England just got bad.

(This isn’t the New England Vampire Panic, so apologies for any Google keyword searches for that that brought you here. The New England Vampire Panic is a real thing, but it is significantly different and much more tragic than any story I’m writing. In the 18th and 19th centuries, an outbreak of tuberculosis in southern New England led to fears of vampires and people exhuming corpses to prevent them from coming after the living. If you want more information on that, look up the story of Mercy Brown, who was the most famous case of postmortum vampire accusations.)

The big thing with this volume was pulling things that have been mentioned throughout the series and braiding them together with major ongoing plots and some new details that’ll then get weaved into later books (like what the hell is going on with Franklin County). Vampires came up for the first time in Book 1, with mention of the Westminster vampire nest and discussion of Uncle Tommy and Aunt Mary’s experiences with them. This means that technically, vampires are the catalyst for James’s entire adult life, since it was that experience that inspired him to join the Foundation in the first place. So vampires have always been lurking in the background of this series.

Plus, a couple years before the series began, James led a vampire case where the vampire attacked and glamored Bradley, using him to try to kill James and Amelia. (Detailed in The Lancaster Line, a prequel novella that you know by now isn’t required to know that this happened, but adds more detail.) And while the other two treated it as something that could happen on any normal case (though now that they’ve been on the receiving end of similar treatment, maybe not so much), Bradley has quietly carried the trauma of that case with him throughout the series, culminating in a volume where his vulnerability is far more on display than in any of the previous books. 

And that’s another thing I wanted to get into with this entry. Amelia and Bradley are both cracking. Even though James has been back in the captain’s position for almost a year now, the two of them are still dealing with the lingering impact of running the branch through that emergency and then immediately segueing back to “normal” when he returned. They’re exhausted, they’ve been exhausted since Book 10, and vampires aren’t making it any better. So now that James is established as scarred, but solidly back, it makes sense that this is the case on which they’d both break. 

Then there’s the way Rosa’s drifted from Amelia over the course of several books and how that comes to a head. And then there’s Gabriella and Elliot and the fact that she now has unexpected closure with him. He’s dipped in and out of her life and has been quietly getting his own act together in the background. But while things were messy with them for a long time, going through the Westminster case together lets them finally end on a stable note.

Not that this is the end of Elliot in the series. You all know how much I love a sprawling cast of characters. (Hello dozens of cousins and McGovern with a flamethrower) It’s just the end of Gabriella’s “Do I want to be with him? Why am I focusing on him while a monster is trying to eat me?” internal dialogues. 

Besides, Elliot’s situation is far from neat, which I’ll get into in a second.

While this is Gabriella’s story, it’s very much focused on the entire crew. Even her research starts with her interest in Bradley’s psychic abilities and is nearly knocked off course by Dr. Hillard, their difficult new medic. But she’s right there in all the action and it’s another chainlink in Gabriella’s longterm story. As the two POV characters, Gabriella and James each have an individual story that runs the length of the series. Gabriella’s story is essentially her growing up. She’s come of age, like I talked about in earlier book letters, but what comes next? She’s twenty-five, which is not a kid anymore and she’s learning how to be an adult in the world. So grad school and more responsibility at work are a major part of that. As is that “Big and scary, but good” thing lingering in her future.

(James’s story burns a little slower than Gabriella’s does, so we’ll talk more about that one at a later date.)

When I was editing and formatting Westminster, there ended up being a lot of intentional and unintentional repetition, swaps, and cycles. Amelia is hurting, Bradley supports her. Then it’s Bradley’s turn to finally break down and James is the one supporting him. Amelia worked toward the captaincy as Madelyn tried to sort out her life for so long, now Madelyn is on the captain’s path while Amelia doesn’t know what she wants to do. 

Within these repetitions and cycles are three separate stories of team members in love with Foundation captains. As Bradley explained to Gabriella back in O’Toole House (NCPU11), relationships between captains and someone on their team are one of the few things that will immediately get both people fired. Elliot and Saskia are completely infatuated with each other, but she’s his boss and if they give in to temptation, they’re both screwed. Then there’s Amelia and Rosa, who could date without any risk, but Rosa’s hesitation and the steps she’s taking to protect herself are too much for Amelia, who is finally standing up for herself after years of letting women walk all over her. The problem here isn’t the Foundation and simple regulations aren’t going to fix it.

Then there’s something I’ve gotten many comments about. Years ago, my best friend texted to let me know she’d finished reading Jarvis Street and my first question for her was whether it was clear enough that Bradley was in love with James and furious about it. So there’s number three. Even if he wasn’t the most secretive man in central Massachusetts and wasn’t aware it was unrequited, Bradley knows Foundation protocol as well as anybody. But mostly he’d rather die than share any single emotion he might have. So as far as he knows, nothing will ever happen and nobody else ever needs to know about it.

Except that, you know, everybody has figured it out. Except for James, of course. 

So what comes next? Well, this book is officially the halfway mark for North County Paranormal Unit. I finally sat down recently and sorted out the broad strokes for the remainder of the series and it looks like it comes in at thirty books, plus however many side stories. Book 16, Berkshire Convention Center, is in the works now, with an optimistic December 2026 release date. In that one, James drags Amelia and Bradley to a Foundation leadership training convention out in the Berkshires while Madelyn takes on a weekend in the captaincy back home. It’s a lighter case involving a haunted bookstore James wanders into during a lunch break. 

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Talk to you soon!

-Amanda