Make Me Dead: A Vampyres of Hollywood Mystery

Horror fans are getting more than their money’s worth at NOLA Ghoulfest III! Even before she stepped onto the floor, Ovsanna Moore, star of 18 blockbuster horror movies, writer, producer, and head of Anticipation Studios, knew they were all in for a bumpy ride. She's come to promote her new film, accompanied by actors from her films and the TV series she produces, among them, a young diva, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, and the actress who plays his mother, with whom he is having an affair. The diva can't seem to stop threatening to kill her husband, so Ovsanna is working mightily to keep them from crossing paths. But Ovsanna smells trouble: someone in the convention hall is schizophrenic. She has detected this through her extraordinary sense of smell, because in her "private life" she is Ovsanna Hovannes Garebedian-- the 450-year-old Chatelaine of the Clan Dakhanavar of the First Bloodline, and the most powerful vampyre in Hollywood. Ovsanna easily identifies the disturbed person, a 60-year-old Buffy the Vampire Slayer who discovers it’s not as easy to kill a vampire as it looks on TV. Mere mortals, on the other hand, are dropping like flies! Fortunately, Ovsanna’s current flame, delicious Beverly Hills cop Peter King, has also accompanied her, and he’s not going to let a little thing like lack of jurisdiction stop him from finding the killer. But this is a convention, a horror convention at that. There are thousands of suspects-- with very fertile imaginations! A partial list begins with the usual suspects-- the actor up for a big role against the victim, the diva out for revenge-- and covers some not-quite-the-usual territory, here at the crossroads of Horror and Hoodoo: the snake dancer; the totally-tatted twenty-something Goth with a gel-spiked Mohawk leading to a triceratops ridge down his back, extending to a tale; and, of course, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer senior citizen. Things take a turn for the undeadly when Peter believes he’s spotted Maral McKenzie, Ovsanna’s former assistant, sometime lover, and food-source among the attendees. The last time he'd seen her, she'd tried to kill him, so he knows she's certainly capable of murder-- and that was before he found out she's a "newly-born" vampire.