Introduction

SILVER WINNER: 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards

FINALIST: 2016 National Indie Excellence Awards

FINALIST: 2016 International Book Award  – Mystery/Suspense Category 

A woman and her young son flee to a convent on a remote island off the Breton coast of France.  Generations of seafarers have named the place Ile de la Brume, or Fog Island. In a chapel high on a cliff, a tragic death occurs and a terrified child vanishes into the mist.

The child’s godmother, Maggie O’Shea, haunted by the violent deaths of her husband and best friend, has withdrawn from her life as a classical pianist. But then a recording of unforgettable music and a grainy photograph surface, connecting her missing godson to a long-lost first love. 

The photograph will draw Maggie inexorably into a collision course with criminal forces, decades-long secrets, stolen art and musical artifacts, and deadly terrorists. Her search will take her to the Festival de Musique, Aix-en-Provence, France, where she discovers answers to her husband’s death, an unexpected love?and a musical masterpiece lost for decades.

A compelling blend of suspense, mystery, political intrigue, and romance, The Lost Concerto explores universal themes of loss, vengeance, courage, and love.

(Helaine Mario)

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

BOSTON, TEN MONTHS LATER. JULY 2

“Luze? Are you here? Hello?”

Maggie O’Shea closed the blue door of The Piano Cat music shop and stood motionless, listening.

Too quiet.

The large, book-lined room was cool and empty of customers. Late day sun spilled through the huge bow window onto scattered sheet music and the Steinway grand piano that stood in the curve of the window.

Deliberately turning her back on the piano, she pulled her sweat-soaked t-shirt away from her skin and kicked off her running shoes with a sigh. The afternoon had been too hot to run, after all. You need a shower, she told herself, lifting the heavy mass of her hair away from her neck just as her grandmother’s wall clock began to chime.

Seven o’clock. Finally. Turning to lock the front door, she caught her reflection in the glass. The face staring back at her was a pale oval, all cheekbones and eyes too large for her face, surrounded by a cloud of black hair.

You have hair the color of a summer’s night, Maggie-mine.

She froze.

You never know, she thought, when you will be ambushed by grief.

Now, almost nine months after her husband’s death, there were good days and bad days. Now it was the unexpected moments that triggered the flood of memories. A voice, a word, a gesture from a stranger on the street. The sight of an empty chair at the end of the day. A reflection in a glass…

And earlier, as she’d run through the Boston Public Garden, it was the scent of the roses.

Johnny had always given her roses. “Red for passion,” he’d say in his great rumbling voice, his arms full of huge crimson blooms, “and roses because their scent is like your skin.” Once, in a crowded restaurant, he had leaned across the table and slowly, maddeningly, tucked a rose between her breasts. Then he’d teased her when she blushed like a schoolgirl.

She turned her head, her gaze once more seeking the piano. This time, the Steinway drew her across the room. She sank to the piano bench and clenched her fingers in her lap. In the cluster of silver-framed photographs on the Steinway, Johnny smiled at her from a Martha’s Vineyard dock. One arm was flung affectionately around her son Brian, the other held an enormous bass high in the air. Her husband’s bright blue eyes stared into hers.

We lost you too soon, Johnny.

For almost twenty years, it had been just mother and son. Single mom Maggie Stewart and her son, Brian. A good life, but a quiet one - filled with baseball and school, scouting and piano lessons, and later with girls and jazz concerts and late night talks over huge bowls of popcorn. She could never understand why her son stayed so thin.

And then, the summer before Brian’s last year at Penn, the journalist John Patrick O’Shea had stormed into their lives at a Red Sox game and swept both of them into his magical orbit. A great bear of an Irishman with his wild red beard and rumbling voice, he had filled their small apartment, and their hearts, with joy and laughter.

Now the apartment was quiet again. Brian and his seven months pregnant wife were living in Cape Cod. And the voice of her husband no longer filled the silence.

The soft click of computer keys drifted from the music shop’s rear office. So that was where her friend Luze was hiding. Working late, as usual.

Even the clicking reminded Maggie of her husband. An award-winning investigative reporter, Johnny O’Shea was always banging on his antique Corona late into the night. “Come to bed, Johnny,” she would say. “Finish the story in the morning.” Then the clicking keys would fall silent and she would feel his weight all warm next to her and she would breathe in the woodsy scent of his skin...

She closed her eyes, trying to see his face. But all she could see were broken silver sails spinning in ink-black water. On the bad days, the images repeated in her head, again and again, like the notes in a Bach fugue.

Bach… Maggie’s breath came out in a long sigh as she raised her hands to the Steinway keyboard. Very slowly, her fingertips brushed the ivory and ebony keys, once as warm and alive as her husband’s touch. Now the keys were cold as river stones beneath her rigid fingers.

The Steinway was deafeningly silent. She looked down at the words printed in bold letters on her damp t-shirt. You are the music while the music lasts. T. S. Eliot. “Magdalena O’Shea, concert pianist,” she said aloud. But the music hadn’t lasted…

Her throat tightened. Ex concert pianist, she reminded herself brutally.

God, she missed her music. Some days the longing was almost unbearable. The piano was one of her first memories. And music – it was as essential as air in her life. It was in her blood, her bones, her very soul.

So many times, since her husband’s death, she had forced herself to sit in front of the keyboard and begin the simple scales and chords that would stretch muscles grown stiff with disuse. But each time she tried to play, all she could see was the small shattered sailboat. And her fingers would freeze on the silent keys.

If only I hadn’t asked him to go. If only I’d gone with him. If only he hadn’t gone sailing that day. If only, if only. Sometimes Maggie thought she would go mad with the compulsion to reshape the past.

She sat staring down at her narrow fingers. Johnny had loved to listen to her play the Steinway. “Make your music for me, Lass,” he would say suddenly, coming to her and swinging her around in his arms. “Tonight I need to hear Scarlatti.” And she would play for him.

“I need the music to come back, Johnny,” whispered Maggie. Once again tears threatened unexpectedly behind her lids. I will not cry, she thought furiously. She knew that if she ever really let the tears come she wouldn’t be able to stop the storm until she was completely hollow inside. Until her bones rattled.

“I’ve really made a mess of things, haven’t I, Johnny?”

Sometimes, when she talked to him like this, she could see him so clearly. Her phantom lover, looking at her across the piano, his eyes so blue and electric, his beard red and soft and curling around his smiling mouth. She ached for him, ached for the sound of his voice describing the simple moments of his day.

She closed her eyes. In the stillness of the room, she could feel him now, standing behind her.

Johnny? she tried.

His voice answered, low and close.

Yes, Lass. I’m here.

Johnny! Oh Johnny, I’m missing you so today.

Always near, Mo Graidh.

Sometimes I see your shadow in the mirror. Am I going crazy? Why can I see you?

Because you need to see me, Maggie-mine. But you’re too thin -

You were always the better cook…

No more pills, though, Maggie? No more scotch?

No. I poured everything down the sink.

Holy Mother! Not our Cabernet collection too?

I’m lonely, Johnny, not crazy. But the wine can’t keep the nightmares away.

I know, Lass.

It’s not over, is it, Johnny?

No. It’s not over.

Don’t go. I need to know -

You need to live your life, Maggie-mine. I love you…

He was gone.

Maggie opened her eyes, surprised to find herself alone at the piano. She touched her cheek, certain that she could still feel the gentle caress of her husband’s fingers.

It’s not over…

Fear brushed her, like a shadow in a dark theatre. Behind her the clock chimed the half hour. Seven thirty. Soon it would be dark.

She stood and moved to place the Bach Tomorrow, Offenbach Sooner sign on the blue shop door. Clicking on the radio, she stood very still as the bright opening notes of a Mozart concerto flooded the room. It was the Number 19 in F major. She had played it two summers ago at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Johnny had been watching her from the sixth row.

Damn, damn. Where was a melancholy nocturne when she needed one? Catching up her damp hair with a tortoise clip, her eyes fell on the crystal decanter that sat on a small table by the sofa.

Shower or drink?

“Drink,” she said out loud.

* * *

The dark-skinned man sat at one of the small tables outside the Charles Street Cafe. In the last moments of sunset, the deep-hued red brick across the street glowed with fire. He tapped a pencil thoughtfully on the rim of his coffee cup as he watched the woman’s shadow through the music shop window.

The waiter appeared at his elbow. “A nice glass of Napa Char?”

“Just one more java, pal,” said the man. “Black.” His pencil hovered over the folded newspaper in his hand. “And gimme a fourteen letter word that means ‘sense of the body in space.’”

The waiter just shook his head as he turned away.

The man dropped the newspaper, with its half finished crossword puzzle, to the white tablecloth as his iPhone buzzed for the fifth time in as many minutes.

The clock is ticking on this one…

Once more he looked toward the window in the music shop across the street.

He’d seen her return, watched her disappear through the blue door. A small, slender woman. Some looker, with all that wild black hair. Funny, how life worked sometimes. Because just last week, in Cairo, his friend Ahmed had predicted that there was a woman with hair the color of night in his future.

Just let her be the one. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. How do people handle grief and loss, and how do they find a way to move on?

2. You may have seen the movies, Monuments Men and/or Woman in Gold. Were you aware of how many treasures disappeared or were looted during WWII? Did you know that music disappeared as well?

3. I wrote the book that I wanted to read. That meant writing about something I love – classical music. In The Lost Concerto, it is music that sets this story apart, music that tells Maggie’s story. How important is music in your life? What are you passionate about, what would YOU write about?

4. How do the choices we make shape our lives?

5. What is your definition of courage? What did you like the most about Maggie’s character? Did you enjoy reading about older, ‘more mature’ characters?

6. Can you talk about the emotional toll of wars on our service men and women?

7. What do readers take away from this book?

Weblinks

»	Author Helaine Mario's web site
»	Publisher's Book Info

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