Saturday, June 14, 2008

Vampyres of Hollywood-Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott

Vampyres of Hollywood
Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott
Dunne, Jul 2008, $23.95
ISBN: 9780312367220

Hollywood is stunned when three top gun actors are murdered in two weeks. The prime link between the trio besides ghastly deaths at the hands of the Cinema Slayer serial killer is they are employees of powerful horror queen, Ovsanna Moore, head of a studio.

Beverly Hills Police Detective Peter King leads the official investigation into the macabre homicides. What the cop fails to know is Ovsanna is a five century old vampire, who oversees a network of vampires, many of whom are movie stars. Ovsanna feels she must end the real life horror show that she knows targets her before King realizes the dead were undead and she too is a vampire. If she fails, Ovsanna will give up the good life to be reborn as someone else.

This is an amusing, entertaining but somewhat inane paranormal police procedural in which Peter and Ovsanna rotate perspectives in their cat and mouse contest. Peter is an unknowledgeable modern day Van Helsing while Ovsanna is a twenty-first century CEO Dracula tycoon (vampires adapt). Fans will appreciate their witty war as Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott take an insider bite out of Hollywood, unscrupulous big business CEOs and dedicated literary cops in a satirical tale that asks who is the real dead one, the breathing cop with no life or the undead movie mogul with a fulfilling life.

Harriet Klausner

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