Never Cross a Vampire

The stakes are life and death when Bela Lugosi is threatened in this “affectionate parody of the hard-boiled private-eye” genre (The New York Times).   1942: In the basement of a crumbling Los Angeles movie palace, five vampires crowd around Bela Lugosi. They should not frighten the fading horror icon, who found worldwide fame as Dracula, for these are only wannabes—diehard fans who get their kicks dressing up as bloodsuckers. But Lugosi is terrified, because he knows that one of these crackpots has been making threats against his life. Their fangs may be plastic, but their lethal intentions are all too real.   For protection, Lugosi hires Hollywood private eye Toby Peters, who’s splitting his time between this case and a job for his old employers: the Warner brothers. A Hollywood murder has been linked to one of the studio’s star screenwriters: the brilliant novelist and violent drunk, William Faulkner. To his horror, Peters finds a connection between the two cases. To get Faulkner off the hook, he’ll have to find out who wants to close the coffin lid on Dracula.   With “shades of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett” Edgar Award–winning author Stuart Kaminsky’s 1940s Hollywood PI is once again cracking wise and saving celebrities from psychos (The San Diego Union-Tribune).