Review: Newest horror novel from David Bernstein
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 27, 2014
Bernstein’s latest book starts off in the back woods of New York state and two mobsters from Brooklyn who are up to no good. At 51, Sal is older than most mobsters. His daughter, Melinda, has breast cancer. Although it’s been caught early, there’s always a chance that things might get worse. He feels he should have it, not her. So, basically, he’s got a lot of things on his plate. He’s paranoid about any traces of DNA being tied back to him, so he carries around Ziploc bags in which to put his discarded cigarette butts.They break into a high-security house in the middle of the woods and go into the basement where they find a safe, which Sal has a lifetime of experience cracking. What he finds inside is a briefcase filled with diamonds. But after the discovery, he starts to develop even worse paranoid thinking patterns, becoming convinced that only he must make off with them and that he should get rid of his partner, Bruno. The diamonds seem to have a supernatural hold on him.The briefcase goes to a drug addict, then to a newly unemployed and soon-to-be-homeless woman, her disgusting landlord (disgusting is putting is mildly. There’s a reason Bernstein is good at gross-out horror), and each time it changes hands, with the exception of these three, who all see money in the briefcase, the ‘treasure’ inside changes depending on what the owner’s deepest desire is.Eventually, the briefcase ends up in the hands of Gus, the son of the sleazy landlord, who it turns out has a cheating, manipulative, loathsome wife. She has shacked up with her lover, a high power attorney, and threatens to ensure she gets full custody of Jezebel, her daughter with Gus. This leads to the original owner of the briefcase with the high-security home in the first part of the book coming out of the woodwork so to speak. This leads to the big reveal of what the ‘relics of death’ are, how they work, why people see them and bad things happen when they come into possession of the briefcase.A non-stop action thrill-ride, if you like your books with a breakneck pace that keeps you reading anxiously until the last page, pick up Relic of Death. If you’ve enjoyed his previous work, you’ll dig this one, too.