Death and Transfiguration: A Daniel Jacobus Mystery

Near the start of Elias’s finely tuned, wickedly funny fourth mystery featuring crotchety blind violinist Daniel Jacobus (after 2011’s Death and the Maiden), 41-year-old violinist Sherry O’Brien asks for his help with her audition for concertmaster of the prestigious Harmonium Orchestra. Jacobus, cantankerous as usual, brushes her off. When Sherry kills herself after confronting the orchestra’s notoriously egotistical and caustic director, Vaclac Herza, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia 40 years earlier, Jacobus enlists the aid of his sighted friends to probe into Herza’s past, long rumored to be unsavory. Memorable and shocking encounters in Prague and Tokyo alternate with pungent scenes of rancorous contract negotiations, nail-biting auditions, and the clash of wills between conductor and players, all on the eve of the orchestra’s inauguration of their new concert hall built on landfill off the southern tip of Manhattan. There’s just one word for this book: bravo! Agent: Josh Getzler, Hannigan Salky Getzler Agency. (June)