Nooooo! 😭 I so badly wanted this to be real. I had even looked it up by ISBN to try and order it. The ISBN is for a book titled Brute Orbit, if anybody is curious.
It reminded me of a strange book I read when I was young, an 80s sci-fi I think was called “the wizard of sunset strip”
I’d have absolutely believed this could have been a book by them
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/502308.The_Wizard_of_Sunset_Strip
When mutilated bodies begin turning up in Hollywood and the police are baffled, the young wizard Wydrune and his band–a beautiful cat burglar, a Cockney punk possessed by the spirit of Merlin, and Camelot’s last survivor–take the case