Final "Casquette Girls" book coming in 2026

The big picture: Arden originally published "The Casquette Girls" online in 2013, and it went viral with more than 1 million reads.

• The series weaves in the French Quarter's urban legends about vampires, cemeteries, voodoo and ghosts, says Arden, who was born and raised in New Orleans.
• Book five will focus on the mysterious Count Saint-Germain.
• "We'll finally see what happens with him," Arden says.

What she's saying: "I've always been accustomed to things that go bump in the night," says the French Quarter resident.

• "So I definitely believe in things of the beyond, and I think that I've spent hundreds ... of pages at this point trying to distill that feeling of the spirits of New Orleans to sentences and paragraphs and chapters and books.
• "I don't know that it can truly be felt until you experience it," she tells Axios exclusively.

💭 My thought bubble: I read "The Casquette Girls" before interviewing Arden for the Anne Rice Vampire Lestat Ball, which she co-hosted.

• The first book starts as families are returning to the city after an unnamed catastrophic storm — clearly Katrina.
• I avoided much of the introspective pieces this year for the 20th anniversary, but this tale worked for me because it felt authentic and fantastical at the same time.
• It was a good read, and I'm looking forward to making my way through the rest of the series.

What's next: The final book will be out sometime in 2026.

Go deeper: Inside the sold-out Anne Rice Vampire Lestat Ball