Murder at the Vanities

Bruiser is the story of a man who has always tried to fit in. He keeps his mouth shut, follows the rules, and does what he's supposed to do. But one morning, he wakes up to find his face is gone. All the years of acquiescence have cost him the one thing he can't replace: his identity. Now he's a blank, outside as well as in, an anonymous, featureless phantom. Bent on exacting revenge, he explodes. He isn't going to follow the rules anymore.

Angela Russo, a sixteen-year-old girl, is found dead in a river, having been fatally violated with a large blunt instrument. Inspector Di Salvo is assigned to the case and focuses his investigations on St. Theresa's, the exclusive school where Angela boarded. Three of the murdered girl's classmates, Franca, Paola and Virginia (who call themselves "The Inseparables"), receive threatening poems from an individual using the name "Nemesis." Bizarre "accidents" start to befall the girls: Franca is injured when someone causes her horse to bolt and Virginia nearly breaks her neck on marbles left at the top of a staircase. But Di Salvo is determined to find the killer, even if it means using unorthodox methods. He is aided by Angela Russo's little sister Emily, whose helpful clues lead to a boutique owned by a dubious character and a vice ring where "rich influential men pay well for teenage favours..."

Howard is mild-mannered and slightly simple-minded, with a habit of picking up teenage hitchhikers while driving his delivery routes. Sometimes the girls admit to being runaways, and if they claim to hate their mothers it drives Howard into a violent frenzy; his sister ran away from home years ago and was never heard from again, causing his desperate, addled mother to tighten her hold on him. Howard never remembers raping his victims or strangling them with wire coat hangers, though his boss does notice missed deliveries and late arrivals.

Three stories adapted from the work of Edgar Allen Poe: 1) A man and his daughter are reunited, but the blame for the death of his wife hangs over them, unresolved. 2) A derelict challenges the local wine-tasting champion to a competition, but finds the man's attention to his wife worthy of more dramatic action. 3) A man dying and in great pain agrees to be hypnotized at the moment of death, with unexpected consequences.

In Victorian era London, the inhabitants of a family home with rented rooms upstairs fear the new lodger is Jack the Ripper.

The secretary of an affably suave radio mystery host mysteriously commits suicide after his wealthy young niece disappears.

A fiercely dishonest car salesman hires a new employee who owes a serious debt to loan sharks.

A woman dressed in black is murdering young women. The police question lawyer Anselmi for whom one of the girls worked as a secretary, and it turns out that all the victims were friends of lawyer's wife Leonora.

An elderly couple move into an old, supposedly haunted abandoned house. A young girl comes to live with the pair as a companion for the wife. However, soon the girl is possessed by the spirit of another girl, a wealthy woman who had once lived in the house but who had been murdered there.

After his wife and her blind sister have died under his care, a doctor's small daughter is kidnapped and reported as buried alive, and he is given just five hours to find and rescue her.

A woman is haunted by recurring nightmares, which seem to be instigated by her late husband who supposedly was killed in a fire.