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Overview
In the Grand Sterling Hotel of Midtown Manhattan, home of the huge annual leather/BDSM/fetish ball and contest, Mr. & Ms. Global Leather, last year's male winner lies dead on the floor of his suite, wearing only very frilly, bright yellow panties. Cormac "Mack" Steel made a lot of enemies in his year wearing the studded leather sash, not the least being his co-winner Mistress Ravenfyre. But she is not alone - there are over three thousand attendees at this year's fetish-festooned event from all over the world, some of whom might have had some very personal issues with the corpse.
Enter Detective Rebecca Feldblum of the Midtown East Precinct. Assigned to this doozy of a case because, as one of NYC's only out lesbian detectives, her Lieutenant seems to believe these are "her people." Shocked, amazed and alternately puzzled and amused, Detective Feldblum must navigate a world of doms and subs, masters and mistresses, pups and trainers, leather, latex and lingerie, and discover who murdered the late Mack Steel - and hopefully do it before the weekend is over and everyone goes home. In the process, she will discover more about the sexual underworld than she ever really wanted to know, and more about her own past than she could have ever imagined.
Written in the classic spirit of Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun, The Killer Wore Leather is both an engaging mystery and a humorous glimpse into the world of modern, pansexual international leather/BDSM contests and conferences.
Only Laura Antoniou could write The Killer Wore Leather. In addition to being the author of the best-selling Marketplace series of erotic novels, she has over 20 years of experience teaching, speaking to and occasionally skewering the alt-sex communities around the world. With a wicked sense of humor, insider information and a twisted imagination, she crafts a spicy mélange of mystery and mayhem!
The Killer Wore Leather is a deliciously tongue-in-cheek murder mystery set at a leather convention, allowing readers into this private world of personalities and peccadiloes. The kinkiest game of clue ever with a sex toy as the murder weapon and every leather man and woman lacks an alibi. Cleverly crafted and highly humorous, Antoniou is at her wicked best in this page-turning fetish fest.
Laura is the best-selling author of the classic BDSM series, THE MARKETPLACE, which has sold more than 400,000 copies and been translated into 5 languages.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573449304 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Start Publishing LLC |
| Publication date: | 04/09/2013 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 982,015 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Killer Wore Leather
An S/M MysteryBy Laura Antoniou
Cleis Press
Copyright © 2013 Laura AntoniouAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9781573449304
Chapter One
The multi story atrium of the Grand Sterling Hotel was buzzing with arrivals lining up at the registration desks and at the purple and black draped tables still being set up before the main elevator banks. Five people wearing black t-shirts emblazoned with VOLUNTEER were frantically stuffing stacks of postcards, bookmarks, safe sex kits packaged in little matchbook-like folders and samples of flavored body oils into plastic bags while others were struggling to make label printers and laptops share outlets and table space. Above them, suspended on wires, was a large flag with alternating black and blue stripes and one white one in the middle; in the upper left hand corner was a bright red heart.
It clashed slightly with the purple draping on the tables.
"I registered online under the name Glasser, but I want Lady Stringent on my badge."
"Did you get my e-mail about needing adjoining rooms? I need it for my Daddy's two slaves, they're arriving tomorrow and they might bring a service dog."
"Where do instructors register?"
"Your website never worked for me, can I still get the early bird discount?"
"When are the NA meetings?"
"Where are the quiet rooms?"
"Where are the dungeons?"
"Is the sit-down dinner formal leather, or can you wear casual clothes?"
A frighteningly large woman rose up from where she'd been unpacking a box of lanyards and shouted over the din. Her high, quarterdeck voice easily overwhelmed the crowd of questioners and her sheer bulk intimidated most of them as well. Maureen Olmstead was a hell of a lot of woman – almost five foot ten and easily two-hundred and seventy pounds, much of it molded into a plus-size corset that hefted her generous, pale breasts into a stunning display of cleavage. A net of colorful beaded wire was draped over her long auburn hair; her dark brown eyes narrowed as she took control of the situation.
"Registration will begin in ten minutes! A through M over there, N through Z over there! Instructors, judges, contestants, press and guests, in the office behind me! Printed schedules are late, either check the master schedule on the website or keep your panties on until we get them here! Street legal clothing everywhere but the dungeons and no discounts, we are sold out!"
For a moment, the small crowd just stared at her, perhaps buffeted by the sheer force of her personality. Then, meekly, most of them sorted themselves out into appropriate lines, checked their smart phones and tablets or wandered off.
Maureen adjusted her designer gold-framed glasses and handed the box of lanyards to one of her volunteer force.
"I don't know what we'd do without you, Bitsy," said a harried looking man behind her.
"That's Slave Bitsy," she corrected. "And don't you forget it." At thirty-nine years, Ms. Maureen "Bitsy" Olmstead was getting sick and tired of looking for the right partner, and she wanted to make sure everyone knew she was a slave, just in case Master Wonderful showed up. She plumped up her ample breasts, fluffed out her hair a little under the beads and checked her nails. Impeccable. "Hey!" she cried, pointing. "Don't touch the bags! You'll get one when you register!"
The man in leather pants, shirt, tie and cap drew his hand back quickly and muttered, "Sorry." He obediently shrank back into the line, a bundle of keys jangling on his left hip, and Bitsy turned her attention to her staff. It takes a real slave to run things, she thought for the tenth time that day.
In the conference room behind Bitsy and her army of volunteers, Earl Stemple, producer of the Mr. and Ms. Global Leather (and Bootblack) Contest, stared at the logistics board and checked off boxes as voices reported to him over the headset he wore crookedly. A Bluetooth earpiece was stuck over his left ear; the radio headset was adjusted so one earpiece was on his right. His tight blue Levis were marked with different colored inks, as he would absently wipe the markers across his waist or thighs as he toggled the talk button for the headset or searched for his holstered cell phone. A stocky yet surprisingly agile man, he went back and forth from charts to laptop and conversation to commands, his thick fingers twirling the dry erase markers or stabbing at keyboards as necessary. Twelve half-drunk cups of coffee were scattered over the large conference table, all of them his.
"Tell the dungeon crew we need a spanking bench in Seneca room by ten AM tomorrow. They can have it back later." Click. "Where's our shuttle from the airport? Have him call in please." Click. "What do you mean, there's no hospitality suite? It's room 2001! Call Roger at the front desk, they should be setting up coffee service in there now." Click. "Send all contestants to the Oneida room, tell them to see Boy Jack. No, the other Boy Jack. Send any judges to me in the main office, OK? Where is the other Boy Jack, anyway? I got arrivals stacking up!"
Earl sighed and shook his head, circling a few names on his board. As usual, important people were missing. That was the problem with any event managed by a volunteer staff; people giving their time mostly felt it was theirs to take back as well. Not that he was a volunteer; he had the honor and curse of being the sole paid staff member of the Global Leather empire, consisting of the contest(s) and fetish ball, the souvenir sales, and the Global Leather Foundation, which gave modest amounts of money to several well chosen modest charities. Estimates of how much he made were often wildly off base, as his regular hate mail would attest. Just this morning, he'd gotten a message on KinkyNet, the largest pansexual online space for the BDSM crowd. It read, in typical online style, "u suk! Bloodsucker making millions off the community, u shuld give tkts to people who cant afford them not everyone is rich like u. titles r shit."
Yeah. Titles are shit, but you want a free ticket, you ass. Millions! Wouldn't that be nice? They complained at the registration and contest fees and the prices of the t-shirts but they never wondered how much money it cost to get a hotel in midtown Manhattan, purchase event insurance, cater dinners, rent stage and dungeon equipment, fly in dozens of famous names, and feed hungry judges and contestants. Plus, he had to staff and supply the hospitality room full of free snacks and drinks for volunteers, instructors entertainers, and print thousands of flyers and brochures and schedules...speaking of which...
"Bitsy, did the schedules come in yet?" Click.
"Yeah, we just got 'em now!"
Last minute changes, of course, due to the flakiness of some of the instructors. Earl scratched his scalp under thinning sandy hair. It was probably best that the person originally scheduled to teach “Dark Fantasy Role-playing” decided to stay home because he was having a panic attack. Earl made a note to take that name off the potential invite list.
"Earl! We got a problem," crackled a voice over the radio headset. "Dr. Westfield never made his flight."
The keynote speaker? "Repeat that?"
"I just heard from Greg in the van. He's at the airport. Westfield was not on the flight we booked for him! What should he do now?"
"Tell Greg to continue the pickups." Earl clicked a few times and called his judge wrangler, Boi Jack. "Jack! Call Westfield and find out where he is, he missed his flight. If he needs help rebooking, can you handle that?"
"Um, sure, Earl, but you should know I'm on my way to the lobby, looks like Ravenfyre and Steel arrived at the same time."
Earl cursed and knocked his Bluetooth earpiece off. "OK, I'm on my way. Try to keep them apart before they kill each other!"
Nancy Nichols wanted to be somewhere else. A crane collapse maybe, or a nice, juicy story-of-the-moment that would guarantee a front page burst, a page-three story and a nice pick-up by AP. Maybe this hotel has bedbugs, she mused hopefully, peering up through the layers of suspended light fixtures in the atrium. For some reason, readers were just fascinated by bedbug infestations. That would be a funny headline; bedbugs frighten the freaks.
A...person...walked past her dressed in a fox costume. Head-to-foot, big bushy tail, velvety paws on their hands, pointy nose and ears. What on earth did that have to do with leather? Or the big girl behind the desk in her enormous corset and medieval headwear – Victoria's Secret was safe from her. Where did one find lingerie in huge sizes? Almost everyone else seemed dressed in fairly standard street clothes, many of then dragging fairly standard cheap luggage as they waited patiently in lines. Not exactly the corner of Sodom Street and Gomorrah Avenue.
Not that she expected it to be. "For crying out loud, Vic, this is so tired! No one cares about a bunch of freaky people getting dressed up and playing spanking games anymore. Don't you watch TV? There had to be ten CSI episodes alone about how normal these people are! All in prime time!!"
Vic, her editor, boss and nemesis, didn't even argue. "Then do a story about how normal it all is. The fashion show is Friday, and there's a fetish ball, whatever that is, on Saturday; you'll get Donny for two hours. Get some nice PG-13 pictures for a slide show."
The New York Record loved slide shows and videos on their website. Every story seemed to need one, especially if it involved celebrities, fashion, cooking, accidental nudity or gory tragedies. Stories in the physical paper even had little code boxes people could scan to take their mobile devices right to the in-depth online version. So far, tracking showed that most readers would stay for up to fifteen seconds of advertisements to see ten pictures of, oh, a crane collapse or the latest antics of a celebrity chef having a kitchen accident. Longer, one assumed, if it involved their fashionable clothing being set on fire and falling off.
I shouldn't have come today, she thought. Tomorrow is when the actual event starts. She had thought to get some behind-the-scenes color, but so far there were few opportunities to talk to anyone connected to the event. Miss Massive seemed to be running the show at registration, and all she'd managed to snarl out was that press passes would be available shortly. Nancy had pulled some names off the website for the contest, amused by some of the noms de kinky – she couldn't wait to meet Lord Laertes or Chava Negilla.
"Excuse me, but I think we are colleagues," said a thin, reedy voice from next to her. She turned, hoping it wasn't someone from the News or Post; this might be a stupid story, but it would be hers, dammit. She immediately knew she was safe. The man standing next to her was dressed in badly fitted black leather pants, cinched around his tiny waist and adding to the wrinkles on his black cotton uniform shirt, which was buttoned all the way up to his scrawny neck. A black leather vest was layered on top of the shirt, covered with small cloisonné pins, like the ones you picked up at Disney. These seemed to lack cartoon characters.
Intense dark eyes circled by deep shadows gazed at her with a fascination she read as a kind of hunger. Oily black hair was plastered on his skull; if he'd owned the slightest bit of menace at all, he might have carried off a role as a sinister Nazi interrogator. Instead, he gave off waves of neediness. He was extending something to her; she took a business card and glanced at it.
"I'm Cary Gordon, Leather Today. The official newspaper of the leather/BDSM community."
Oy, Nancy thought. Took Journalism 101 in college twenty years ago, did you? But she plastered her reporter smile on. "Nichols, NY Record. Good to meet ya, Cary. Since you're in the know, maybe you can introduce me around." Because masochism doesn't just belong to you whips and chains people, she added silently. And sometimes, a local guide would manage to cut down the legwork real fast. Find two, three colorful people who look good in their sexy clothing, get a few quotes, and knock this puppy off before dinner.
"I'd be delighted!" he gushed. "It's so rare to see mainstream press attending our little affairs. I hope you aren't here for some sensational look-at-the-freaks story?"
You and me both, brother. "Nah, I think we're beyond that these days, don't you? At least in New York. I'm more into human interest – who are the people who go to these things, what does Mr. And Ms. Global Leather actually do the rest of the year? That sort of thing."
"Well, you're in luck! I know everyone!"
Nancy caught movement out of the corner of her eye and pointed. "How about them?"
It looked like a meeting of the Jets and Sharks. On one side, two men; on the other side, two women and a man. It was instantly clear who the gang leaders were.
"Those are last year's winners!" Cary supplied earnestly, taking pictures with his cell phone. "That's Mack Steel, with the sash on, and the woman with the red hair is Mistress Ravenfyre. They're judges for this year's contest, you know, the old winners are always judges for the next year."
Nancy watched the man in the black leather, silver studded sash and the woman in the very tight emerald green sundress and strappy sandals and knew something else about these two.
"They hate each other," she said, with some measure of delight.
Cary sighed with a hangdog nod. "I'm afraid they do," he said.
Nancy chuckled and snapped a few photos herself.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Killer Wore Leather by Laura Antoniou Copyright © 2013 by Laura Antoniou. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
"A police procedural with fresh, funny take on the fetish underground."
— James Lear, author of The Back Passage
"If knitters, bibliophiles, and teatotalers can have their mystery mavens, why not the BDSM leather world? And who better to deliver it than Laura Antoniou? Her finely honed rapier whit and keen eye for all things madcap makes The Killer Wore Leather one meaty tale of murder, mystery, and mayhem. Frankly, you're suspect if you overlook it."
–Debra Hyde, author of Lambda Award winner, The Story of L
"This may well be the best book of the year – The Killer Wore Leather is 50 shades of hilarious!"
–Glenda Rider, Producer, International Ms. Leather
"Lately it’s easier to find someone to hurt me consensually than to make me laugh, so I’m just tickled pink that Laura Antoniou, primarily known for her top-shelf erotica, has decided to render us helpless with laughter in a new comic murder mystery, The Killer Wore Leather. No one gets a pass, and no ego goes unpricked. The author has a keen eye for the posturing and paradoxes of the leather world, yet there’s nothing malicious here. Because it is obvious that the book is a love letter of sorts. Antoniou doesn’t overlook anybody’s contribution to making the kinky world go ‘round. Not just the contestants and judges, but the harried producers, the dedicated volunteers and the oft-neglected vendors — all of them get a moment in the spotlight to share their unique perspectives. The Killer Wore Leather comes just in the nick of time for me. Fifty Shades of Grey stopped being funny around page 34, so thank you, Laura, for giving me something that’s supposed to make me laugh!"
–Kate KInsey, author of Red
"If you've ever experienced a Leather Contest - from the inside, outside, or somewhere in-between - you must read this book. A perfect parody (or should I say, telling lens?) on the community, with a gripping murder mystery wrapped around it. I was hooked immediately, in between my knowing-head-nods and embarrassed guffaws."
–kd diamond, International Ms. Bootblack 2011
"Laura Antoniou has a winner in The Killer Wore Leather. Her grasp of the leather contest scene is erie. She captures all the fun and all the drama of these events. You'll swear you've alreaqdy met many of her characters. I thouroughly enjoyed reading this book, it really made me laugh." –Chuck Renslow, Executive Producer International Mr. Leather
"After decades of delightfully decadent kinky prose, Ms. Antoniou now tantalizes by tickling the funny-bone and leading us through a delightfully twisty, tangled web of intrigue, leather, murder, mayhem and kink. With a sharp eye and a sharper wit, she manages to draw the reader into the underground world of BDSM, build a mystery, lovingly skewer the denizens of the dungeon and tell a tale that will keep you guessing until the very end. Whether you're a jaded veteran of perversion or simply a fan of a good whodunit, The Killer Wore Leather is sure to enslave you with its charm and humor as you submit to this masterful storyteller!"
–Mollena Williams, Ms. San Francisco Leather 2009, International Ms Leather 2010
"One of the funniest books I've read in years; folks will find bits and pieces of themselves and some of their friends in these pages. Antoniou manages to skewer anyone and anything in the Leather Community equally, all the while weaving good detective work with fabulous writing, and there's a happy ending to boot!"
– Viola Johnson, author of To Love, To Obey, To Serve, Librarian of the Carter-Johnson Leather Library, Mom and Grandmom to the Leather Tribe
"Bravo, Laura, for holding up a fun house mirror to the Leather Community! Like all good humor, these pages contain a bone of truth that makes us laugh at ourselves while delivering a satirical bite.
Titleholders, this is a great read when traveling to your next contest or run, with caricatures of almost every type in our Community, from the controlling slave Bitsy to the self important, Gay titleholder, Mack Steele. Download it to your Kindle and enjoy it en route. "
–Hugh B Russell, International LeatherSIR 2010
"With The Killer Wore Leather Laura Antoniou takes on the mystery genre with aplomb. It's a riveting story set in the leather and kink worlds that doesn't succumb to the sensationalist approaches other less well crafted novels might have embraced. I love mysteries, and I love this book.
–Race Bannon, Author, Learning the Ropes