Gerald Elias, winner of last year’s Utah Book Award for his musical mystery novel Danse Macabre, is back with the fourth novel in his series featuring amateur sleuth and cantankerous violin teacher, Danile Jacobs. Death and Transfiguration was released by Minotaur Books last week and the local launch party is this Friday, June 29, at 7 pm at King’s English in Sugar House. Elias will read from and sign copies of the book and will also perform passages of the music mentioned in his novels. Refreshments will be provided by Mazza Middle Eastern Cuisine.
And listen Thursday morning at 9:40 a.m. as Jennifer Napier-Pearce interviews Elias on KCPW’s CityViews.
Here’s the publisher’s blurb for Death and Transfiguration:
Vaclav Herza, the last of a dying breed of great but tyrannical conductors, has been music director of Harmonium for forty years. The world famous touring orchestra was created for him when he fled Czechoslovakia for America during the political turmoil in Eastern Europe in 1956. It is the eve of the opening of a dramatic new concert hall designed by Herza himself. It is also the eleventh hour of intense contract negotiations with the musicians that have strained relations within the organization. When the acting concertmaster, Scheherazade O’Brien, is summarily dismissed by the despotic Herza for the permanent concertmaster position, an audition she was poised to win, O’Brien slits her wrists and the orchestra becomes convulsed. Now, blind, cantankerous violin teacher Daniel Jacobus, who had shunned O’Brien’s earlier plea for help against Herza’s relentless harassment, investigates Herza’s dark past not only in Prague, but in Tokyo and New York. With the help of his old friends Nathaniel Williams, Max Furukawa, and Martin Lilburn, he seeks not only revenge but redemption from the guilt of his own past.
Elias will perform passages of the music mentioned in his novels. Refreshments will be provided by Mazza Middle Eastern Cuisine.
A review of Elias’ previous novel, Danse Macabre, appeared in our October 2011 edition of 15 Bytes.
Categories: Daily Bytes | Literary Arts | Music
