Daylight by Elizabeth Knox

"Brian “Bad” Phelan, a New Zealand policeman and bomb disposal expert, likes to live dangerously. Bad is an expert climber and caver and, while on vacation on the French/Italian border, he helps bring a body out of a rocky, wave-swept cove. Curiously, the dead woman bears striking similarities to a young woman he met years ago, shortly before she disappeared in a flooded French cave. Haunted by the strange connection, Bad is compelled to investigate.

In following a series of increasingly eerie leads, Bad learns the story of the Blessed Martine Raimondi, a World War II resistance heroine and martyred nun. He also meets Eve Moskelute, the beautiful widow of a celebrated French artist; Daniel Octave, a Canadian Jesuit who investigates miracles; and most surprisingly, Dawn Moskelute, Eve’s twin sister, who just may be a vampire.

Sensuous and heavenly, Daylight combines Elizabeth Knox’s greatest gifts: her wildly imaginative storytelling and her clear eye for atmosphere and place. Daylight is set in one of the most beautiful regions on Earth, from the unspoiled beauty of the Cinque Terre to the antiquities of Avignon, yet much of the action takes place in a world the tourist never sees, a world of caves and secret passages, of hidden cloisters and the rooms behind doors in the vaulted tunnels of medieval streets. It is in this “world beneath the world” that Bad Phelan finds himself face to face with history and myth, with phantoms whose hearts are still beating, and hungry, and able to break." (From book cover)

Hardcover Info: ISBN 0345457951, Ballantine Books, 2003