Crimson Cabaret

Vera is a hundred-year-old vampire from Chicago who comes to Tucson in 2000 convinced she can build something of her own. The woman she has to ask for permission has been in this desert longer than Chicago has had a name.

It opens in 1892, on a packed-dirt street in Barrio Viejo, with a former mayor four years into the dark and a rule that fails the first time it matters. This book opens the city before the survivors arrive in it.