Death to the Vampire!

Just last week, fellow blogger TomCat took a look at Mike Resnick’s Stalking the Dragon, a parody of hardboiled detective stories with a simple premise at heart: the story, while told in a hardboiled style, took place in a parallel universe with goblins, leprechauns, dragons, and the like walking down the same streets as the private eye, John Justice Mallory. And I instantly resolved to read one of these books in the near future (especially seeing what time of year this is). Well, that day is today, and the book in question is Resnick’s Stalking the Vampire.

It’s Halloween, and detective John Justice Mallory notices that his partner, Winifred Carruthers, seems unusually pale. That’s when he notices the bite-marks on her neck, and he quickly deduces that they were inflicted by her nephew Rupert, who has come over for a visit to his aunt. Well, it’s true: on the boat over to New York, Rupert was bitten by a vampire named Aristotle Draconis, and now Mallory has to figure out how to protect Winifred from her nephew. But then Rupert disappears, and is later found murdered outside Winifred’s apartment. Is Draconis responsible? And if not him, who?