Bloodsucker City by Jim Towns

Female Shawshank Redemption with vampires sounded cheekily, cheesily intriguing. Enough to override my initial reservations, because I don’t really care for vampire fiction, too trite, too clichéd, really the least interesting of monsters out there.
But, lo and behold, this turned out to be surprisingly good and neither cheeky nor, more importantly, cheesy. In fact, the author did the vampires just right, not glamour, no decadence, these exsanguinators are pure ancient evil and pure present danger. Their castle…a remote island prison for women, a building seemingly etched into its surroundings (rendered as perfectly darkly atmospheric as you’d expect from a scary story), one with a series of subterranean places you wouldn’t want to find yourself in. Well, you wouldn’t want to find yourself anywhere near that island in general and yet one wrongly accused, wrongly convicted woman does.
This book is her journey as she slowly gets clued in the terrible and terrifying secrets of the prison and its Wardens. Will she survive? Will anyone? Read and find out.
The story takes place in 1933 and the vampires in it by then are already experiencing the push of modernization, this prison was their attempt at adaptation to the ever changing world, but there are still difficulties with management. Can it be (gasp) an end of a very long era? But don’t pity them, these guys are an ancient nightmare that needs erasing.
For all his evil, Warden Samuel Norton never considered drinking his inmates.
So yeah, this was fun and quite well done. So much so I'm rounding up my rating in a feat of uncharacteristic generosity. Recommended for genre fans. Thanks Netgalley.