Requiem in Vienna
A Viennese Mystery
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"What Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did for Victorian London and Caleb Carr did for old New York, Sydney Jones does for historic Vienna."
—Karen Harper, New York Times bestselling author of the Queen Elizabeth I mystery series
At first it seemed like a series of accidents plagued Vienna's Court Opera. But after a singer is killed during rehearsals of a new production, the evidence suggests something much more dangerous. Someone is trying to murder the famed conductor and composer Gustav Mahler. Worse, Mahler might not be the first musical genius to be dispatched by this unknown killer.
Alma Schindler, one of Mahler's many would-be mistresses, asks the lawyer and aspiring private investigator Karl Werthen to help stop the attacks. With his new wife, Berthe, and his old friend, the criminologist Hanns Gross, Werthen delves into Vienna's rich society of musicians to discover the identity of the person who has targeted one of Austria's best-known artists.
Set during the peak of Vienna's cultural renaissance and featuring some of the city's most colorful residents, Requiem in Vienna is a perfect historical fiction. Rich in description and populated by vivid characters, this is a mystery that will leave readers guessing until the very last moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1899, Jones's fine second Viennese mystery (after 2009's The Empty Mirror) opens with a falling fire curtain narrowly missing Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna Court Opera, but killing a soprano during a stage rehearsal. Lawyer and private inquirer Karl Werthen teams with criminologist Hanns Gross to look into this and subsequent "accidents" apparently aimed at Mahler. As the investigation descends into the "damned politics of music," Mahler, a former Jew who must be careful to hide his contempt for fellow composer Richard Wagner, emerges as the nexus for an "ever-widening pool of suspects." Complicating matters are big changes in Werthen's home life, in particular wife Berthe's pregnancy. Jones, the author of Hitler in Vienna, 1907 1913 and other nonfiction books about the city, smoothly blends a compelling period whodunit with bountiful cultural and social details.