Dead, Mr. Mozart

It is London in 1820, and a certain down-at-the-heels Austrian musician who has been living in England for many years is about to get another chance. That musician is Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart - 64 years old, a Mason, the composer of such peerless operas as Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte, whose work has not been receiving the renown and remuneration that it deserves. But the King has just died, and it is time to plan for the coronation of George IV - a suitable occasion for a major new opera. Surely this is the opportunity that Mozart has been waiting for, but plans for the coronation are not proceeding as smoothly as everyone had hoped in the face of the scandals swirling around the King and his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick.

When Mozart discovers that his theater is at the center of a plot to discredit Caroline, he uneasily holds his tongue - until the machinations give way to murder, and Mozart's patron orders him to help dispose of the body. This is no work for a great musician, and Mozart is finally goaded to seek the truth behind the intrigues that left a poor servant girl dead on the dressing-room floor.

To Die Like a Gentleman, the first period mystery by Robert Barnard writing as Bernard Bastable, was called "sheer delight in the hands of a master of the genre" in a starred review from Kirkus. Now, in his second Bernard Bastable title, the author makes full use of his wit and creative powers in a brilliantly imagined tour de force, Dead, Mr. Mozart.