A freak summer storm severs an island music festival in the middle of Utah's Great Salt Lake from the mainland. When one festival administrator, and then a second, is found dead, can curmudgeonly Daniel Jacobus solve the murders before his protégée, violinist Yumi Shinagawa, becomes the third victim?

A packed house at London's famed Royal Albert Hall. Gustav Mahler's monumental 6th Symphony, with its three massive hammer strokes of Fate. The first and the second go by uneventfully. But then, the third! Will Mahler's third hammer stroke of Fate claim another victim?Gerald Elias's riveting eighth installment of the critically acclaimed Daniel Jacobus mystery series will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Blind, curmudgeonly violinist Jacobus and his devoted companions, Yumi Shinagawa and Nathaniel Williams, join forces with Branwell Small, a questionably trustworthy partner in crime solving, and officious DCI Christopher Mattheson as they follow every baffling twist and turn in a truly classical whodunnit.

Simmering just under the surface of the levity of Roundtree Days, an annual festival celebrating the sensational hit television series, Roundtree, a clash of cultures between traditional and progressive values threatens to tear apart a proud Western town surrounded by an unforgiving desert environment. In a single day, Jefferson Dance, acting sheriff of Loomis City, Utah, confronts a suspected kidnapping, a surreal hostage situation, arson, and murder, while fending off his popular fictional double, who the public perceives as a real life hero. In a setting in which fantasy and reality become blurred, Dance unearths the town's dark secrets as he brings the culprits to justice in the course of twenty-four hours.

Daniel Jacobus, reclusive blind concert master and amateur sleuth, returns to solve a most despicable crime and to clear an innocent manJust after his Carnegie Hall swansong and before his imminent departure for retirement in France, beloved violinist and humanitarian Rene Allard is brutally murdered with a mysterious weapon. His young African American rival, crossover artist BTower, is spotted at the scene of the crime hovering over the contorted body of Allard with blood on his hands. In short order the aloof and arrogant BTower is convicted and sentenced to death, in part the result of the testimony of blind and curmudgeonly violin pedagogue Daniel Jacobus, like millions of others, an ardent admirer of Allard. Justice has been served...or has it? Jacobus is dragged back into the case kicking and screaming, and reluctantly follows a trail of broken violins and broken lives as it leads inexorably to the truth, and to his own mortal peril.

The latest Daniel Jacobus mystery holds a mirror to the glittery façade of the concert world, delving into the multimillion-dollar sleight-of-hand of violin dealing . . . When an anxious phone call from obscure violinmaker Amadeo Borlotti disturbs Daniel Jacobus's Christmas Eve festivities, he and his dear friends Nathaniel and Yumi make light of it. A seemingly humble practitioner of his craft, Borlotti preferred the quiet life in the country away from the limelight. He even found love at an advanced age. But his larceny, which began as a typographical error in a bill for a violin repair, grew incessantly. In the end he became a helpless captive of his past indiscretions and was consumed by it, and it is up to Jacobus and his team to find out how, and why.

When reclusive, blind violin pedagogue Daniel Jacobus is invited to speak at a seemingly innocuous symposium on Baroque music at a prestigious music conservatory, he has no idea he is about to become enmeshed in an entrenched culture of sexual harassment and its cover-up at the highest levels. And when a renowned faculty member dies of apparent natural causes, only the curious behaviour of a violin student at Jacobus's master class is an indication to him that something may be terribly amiss.

As the New Magini String Quartet prepares for a performance of Schubert's masterpiece, "Death and the Maiden," which it hopes will resuscitate its faltering career, someone starts picking off members of the string quartet a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.Dogged by internal dissension and by a potentially devastating lawsuit from its fired second violinist, the famed New Magini String Quartet is on the brink of professional and personal collapse. The quartet pins its hopes on a multi-media Carnegie Hall performance of Franz Schubert's masterpiece, "Death and the Maiden," to resurrect its faltering fortunes. But as the fateful downbeat approaches, a la Agatha Christie, one by one the quartet's musicians mysteriously vanish, including second violinist, Yumi Shinagawa, former student of renowned blind pedagogue and amateur sleuth, Daniel Jacobus.It is left up to the begrudging Jacobus, with his old friend, Nathaniel Williams, and a new...

The fourth book in the series featuring the irascible but loveable amateur sleuth Daniel JacobusVaclav 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,...

From concert violinist Gerald Elias comes this debut set in the classical music world about the theft of a priceless violin.Daniel Jacobus is a blind, reclusive, crotchety violin teacher living in self-imposed exile in rural New England. He spends his time chain-smoking, listening to old LPs, and occasionally taking on new students, whom he berates in the hope that they will flee. Jacobus is drawn back into the world he left behind when he decides to attend The Grimsley Competition at Carnegie Hall. The young winner of this competition is granted the honor of playing the Piccolino Stradivarius, a uniquely dazzling three-quarter-size violin that has brought misfortune to all who possessed it over the centuries. But the violin is stolen before the winner of the competition has a chance to play it, and Jacobus is the primary suspect. With the help of his friend and former musical partner, Nathaniel Williams, his new...