Excerpt (+ a Giveaway): The Killer Wore Leather by Laura Antoniou

Today we have an excerpt from The Killer Wore Leather by Laura Antoniou to share.

Mr. Global Leather has been murdered!
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 yea

r’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.

Read an excerpt:

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.

Doesn’t that sound good? Would you like to win a copy? That’s great, because we’re giving 5 away!

**Giveaway** Leave a comment on this post for a chance to win one of five (5) copies of The Killer Wore Leather. Please note: you must include a valid email address with your comment to be eligible. Contest Ends: 5/31/13 @ 11:59pm. **Giveaway**

Visit Laura’s website to learn more about this and her other works.

This book is available from Cleis Press. You can buy it here or here.

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