Capitol Murder

Last year FreshHell sent me one of the books left in her rented beach house and I found it hilariously bad, so this year she rented a different, more upscale house and sent me one of the books she found there, William Bernhardt's Capitol Murder. Although it's better written--no, probably because it's better written--it's an even more repellent book, one that I'd certainly try to leave wherever I discovered it.

The action begins with a video of a young girl having sex with a U.S. Senator, a video which includes gagging and retching noises and is eventually shown in court during the Senator's trial for murdering the girl. And the description gets much worse from there.

An investigator for the senator's defense explores various S&M sex clubs, complete with details on what he sees, and progresses to the inner "temple" of a vampire cult who "call upon the Undead Gods, the ancient Sumerian vampire dragon goddess, Tiamat, and the way of the Magick" before they use their specially sharpened teeth to bite each other's shoulders and drink blood.

The leader of the "vampires" is a murderer who enjoys torture. There's a graphic description of how he forces an underling to torture the investigator, complete with scintillating lines like "hurt him again." But the exposure of the vamp leader is merely a red herring. The girl's murderer is someone else, someone you don't really know enough about to suspect.

Why fiction of this kind is written, I don't know. But I think it's now established that you should never read a paperback novel you find abandoned in a rental beach house. It's like necromancy...it never pays.