It’s just a week until the publication of the latest Galbraith & Pole adventure, Monsters in the Mist, with my Undead hero, so please forgive me for another post about vampires.

What do vampires mean to you?

The ultimate vampire, of course, is Dracula and the classic book about him is Bram Stoker’s novel. But if you want to write about vampires nowadays, you need to take a long, hard look at the myth. Can vampires really turn themselves into wolves or bats? Do the laws of physics not apply, so they throw no reflections and cannot be photographed? The vampires of the 19th century were truly supernatural beings, but nowadays there is so much that is almost magical about science that it seems better to make our vampires something that can at least partly be explained rationally.

My vampires like to fit in unnoticed around humans. They do, it’s true, avoid daylight – but many people nowadays live much of their lives in the dark With the aid of sunglasses and high factor sunscreen, vampires can get by. Many of them don’t like garlic, but who can blame them? Garlic certainly won’t kill them. Neither will most things, though a stake through the heart really is fatal – but so is a bullet.

My vampires like to hang out round Brompton Cemetery with its baroque sepulchres. Some even live there, but most prefer the comfort of regular houses. With money carefully invested over centuries, many can afford apartments in the nicer parts of Chelsea.

The whole ‘drinking blood’ thing can be problematic, but as illegal highs go, blood is quite easy to get hold of and it isn’t as if they don’t enjoy a good meal or a fine Scotch. They enjoy a lot of the finer things in life: if you have hundreds of years to develop your taste, you can become quite a connoisseur.

There are murderous vampires, of course, just as there are murderous humans. Given that the first Galbraith & Pole story, Something Wicked, is a twist on the police procedural genre, there has to be a murderous vampire or there wouldn’t be a story. But there are vampire policemen too, tidying up after the renegades like my vampire hero, Chief Inspector Pole.

If vampires were living among us, you’d think that somebody would have noticed something odd. And people do. But the government colludes with the vampires to cover things up. It’s convenient for governments to be owed favours by immortal beings who have been forced to learn how to move silently and undetected through the night and who can, when necessary, kill before vanishing away without trace.

What would happen if one of these vampires met a down-to-earth human policeman who was less than happy to keep their secret? How does a policeman solve a case when the chief suspect is a creature that no-one can know exists?

Meet Chief Inspector Galbraith and join him on a journey through a London nobody knew existed.

Something Wicked did not set the bestseller lists ablaze, but enough people liked it for me to produce a sequel, Eat the Poor, which has a definite satirical edge as Galbraith and Pole hunt down a werewolf with links to the world of Westminster.

With Monsters in the Mist, Galbraith and Pole have been taken out of their comfort zone as they investigate a killing on the mountains of mid-Wales. Could this be another werewolf or are there even darker forces afoot? It’s story that takes us from an isolated farm to the government research centre at Porton Down and an explosive climax at a secret military base just off the M4. Some of the locations are entirely fictitious, but they’re not the ones you’re thinking of.

Galbraith and Pole explore the world outside the M25 and you may never look at it quite the same way again.

Monsters in the Mist is on pre-order for Kindle (£3.99) at mybook.to/MonstersInTheMist. It’s also available in paperback from Thursday at £6.99.