The Beethoven Boomerang
Eighth in the Megan Crespi Series
A black student is shot dead during a demonstration claiming “Beethoven Was Black” in Bonn’s historic Münsterplatz with its majestic monument to the Bonn-born composer. Attending a Beethoven jubilee conference in the city is retired professor turned art crimes detective Megan Crespi with her American colleague and Beethoven expert, Will Meridian. During their symposium on the composer one of the participants is also killed. Who is the assassin or assassins and why do the murders continue?
The cast of characters and suspects Megan is confronted with include Bettina Brentano, ambitious conductor of the Bonn Classical Philharmonic, Oskar van der Fresser, founder of the Beethoven und Du Museum in Vienna, Dr. Seide Sammlerin, over- protective director of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Tobias Neidisch, Beethovenhalle night guard with a chip on his shoulder, Dr. Li Shutong, with a singular background relating to Beethoven in China, Leopold Weissknab, white supremacist student studying at Bonn University, Louis van Hoven, a self-declared direct descendant of Ludwig van Beethoven, Clemens Karl von Masuren, beloved conductor of the Beethoven Orchester Bonn, and Takuto Nisemono, conductor and composer once considered “the Beethoven of Japan,” now disgraced but defiant and scheming a come-back.
Megan’s pursuit of Beethoven-related criminal activity extends to a cruise ship bound for China and additional deaths. Can justice prevail?
THE MAHLER MAYHEM
Seventh in the Megan Crespi Series
During intermission at the Vienna State Opera, art history professor Megan Crespi, traveling with her former student, cellist Egga Streicher, discovers something not quite right about the bust of Gustav Mahler exhibited in the foyer. A few minutes after the opera resumes, an explosion rocks the house. As Crespi joins the police in interviewing orchestra members, several instrumentalists seem likely suspects. And a hate note found in the foyer triggers anti-Semitic acts of vandalism around the city.
An unthinkable disaster occurs when Jewish conductor Gerald Chaplin conducts Mahler’s Second Symphony at Vienna’s Musikverein. Another calamity takes place during a performance of Nathan the Wise with its message of harmony between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Several people could be involved: Stefan and Adele Basileus, who both have jobs at the Opera, a hate-filled university student, Karl Lueger, and the transplanted American family of Harry Howell and Haim Elisaf. A climaxing exchange of goods takes place atop Vienna’s giant Ferris wheel and eye-opening discoveries concerning Gustav Klimt and Gustav Mahler crown Crespi’s labyrinthine investigation.
THE KANDINSKY CONUNDRUM
Sixth in the Megan Crespi Series
A moving van filled with eleven Wassily Kandinsky paintings stolen from Munich’s famous Lenbach House Museum during a violent neo-Nazi demonstration is hijacked in Slovakia. Two rival Kandinsky collectors appear to be involved: Igor Rasputin of Odessa, visiting in Munich, and Boris Zima of Moscow, whose agent Raisa Sokolova is keeping tabs on Rasputin. Puzzlingly, the museum adamantly declares there has been no theft, even though its night watchman has been found murdered.
Also visiting Munich is retired art history professor Megan Crespi, slated to give a lecture she titles curiously, “Double Kandinsky.” In between visits to “mad” King Ludwig’s fantasy castles, Megan comes into contact with possible suspects, ranging from Rasputin to Iris and Laszlo Togarassy, owners of Munich’s new The Blue Rider gallery and featuring Kandinsky’s works, to Helene Keller, associate director of the Lenbach. Manipulating events connected with the theft are a young, careless gambler who owns a building behind the Lenbach, two men from the Ukrainian island of Amiinyi—one a computer wizard, the other a science photographer—and their Munich engineer friend Alyksandr Miesel, neo-Nazi leader Walter Krankenhauer, and Detective Dieter Löser.
Crespi’s lecture, including results of state-of-the-art XRF technology, becomes the revelatory preamble to a thrilling denouement that cracks the Kandinsky conundrum.
click here for a Reader's Guide to The Kandinsky Conundrum!
THE KOLLWITZ CALAMITIES
Fifth in the Megan Crespi Series
Two monumental granite statues by famed German artist Käthe Kollwitz—Grieving Parents—have been stolen from a World War I soldiers’ cemetery in Belgium. What could the motive have been for such an unlikely theft?
On a visit to the director of the Kollwitz Museum in Cologne, retired art history professor and Kollwitz scholar Megan Crespi is asked to aid in tracking down the robber or robbers. As she pursues clues and visits possible suspects, more Kollwitz statues are stolen from Cologne and Berlin.
Crespi’s itinerary takes her to the Berlin Kollwitz Museum, Weimar, the Baltic Sea island of Rügen, Greifswald, and finally to the Kollwitz Memorial House in Moritzburg. On the way she interacts with physicians Abraham Rückgabe and Iliana Frankel, the just-married couple Monika von Putbus and Akram al-Aljamie, and unscrupulous CEO of Rügen’s asbestos-contaminated Dorotek factory, Reinhold Fromm, collector of dominatrix drawings. We meet possible suspects, Iranian prince Yusri Pahlavi of Nordhausen, greedy gallerist Lukas Zamann, and the mysterious “Marie Schmidt,” of Moritzburg, Kollwitz’s final home. All seem to be connected to the spate of Kollwitz robberies.
Can Crespi solve the inexplicable thefts and will the precious artworks be found? An unexpected denouement involving ten persons and two cats gives us the answer.
click here for a Reader's Guide to The Kollwitz Calamities!
THE MUNCH MURDERS
Fourth in the Megan Crespi Series
The art world is stunned. In the space of a little more than a week three Edvard Munch paintings, including the iconic Scream, have been stolen from museums in Oslo and Stockholm. Retired professor of art history Megan Crespi, on vacation in Scandinavia with her little Maltese dog Button and her old friend Lili Holm, is asked to help. In her capacity as Munch specialist, she visits three possible suspects, all major collectors of Munch, and soon finds her life is endangered. Being kidnapped had not been in her plans.
Who is responsible? The fanatical Norseliga clan, with its emphasis on Norwegian superiority? The beautiful cosmetics queen, Myrtl Kildahl, who hides her German roots, or the Swedish collector who denies he is the grandson of writer August Strindberg?
Pursuit of the truth takes Megan from Copenhagen and Oslo, to Bergen and Trondheim, and finally to Stockholm and the myth-laden island of Runmarö. Megan’s dog adds an element that qualifies him as a detective second only to his mistress.
click here for a Reader's Guide to The Munch Murders!
THE KOKOSCHKA CAPERS
Third in the Megan Crespi Series
In this third in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, a major double portrait by the Viennese Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka showing himself with his lover Alma Mahler has been stolen from the Basel Museum. Left in its place is an exact duplicate, except that Alma has been replaced by an unknown woman. Retired professor of art history Megan Crespi, an expert on Viennese art, is called to help with the investigation.
A second theft of fourteen crates of unknown Kokoschka artworks from a Viennese storage vault brings Megan to Vienna. There she meets by accident the mysterious multimillionaire Desdemona Dumba, who has financed the crate robbery. A stunning anorexic, Desdemona feels it is her sole role in life to bring Kokoschka's lost works together and away from public scrutiny.
Two others, Leo Lang and Bruno Fichte-Mahler, harbor fanatical interest in Kokoschka and go to extreme measures either to desecrate or protect the artist's images of Alma. An endangered Megan pursues leads that take her from Vienna and Berlin to Rabat and Athens and finally to Xenia, Desdemona's remote islet off the Greek island of Corfu - the spitting image of painter Arnold Böcklin's The Isle of the Dead.
On the cover: detail from “Murderer, Hope of Women” by Oskar Kokoschka, 1909, color lithograph, courtesy of the Leopold Museum, Vienna. Cover design by Vicki Abl.
click here for a Reader's Guide to The Kokoschka Capers!
THE SCHIELE SLAUGHTERS
Second in the Megan Crespi Series
In this second of the Megan Crespi Mystery Novel Series, the retired art history professor of Dallas returns to Vienna to help solve the brutal murder of a museum night watchman and a series of attacks on things relating to the Expressionist artist Egon Schiele ranging from black duct or spray paint “censoring” of his nude figures’ private parts to desecration of his burial site.
Three sets of characters are involved with Schiele. The competitive billionaire Russian gallery owners Alexandra Azarova and Boris Ussachevsky; the scheming Grand Master of a secret sect dedicated to the obliteration of obscenity, and his murderous underling; and the greedy self-proclaimed “nearest relative” to Schiele, his great grandnephew, Adolf Peschka-Schiele.
Her own life in danger, the twisting Schiele trail leaves multiple corpses in its wake and leads Megan from conniving Vienna to remote Kaliningrad in Russia, to ancient Krumau in Bohemia, and busy Milan in Italy, as she hunts for a possible hidden trove of major Schiele paintings. What she discovers is undreamt of and leaves the Schiele world stunned and covetous.
FOR REVIEW COPIES OR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: CARL CONDIT / (505) 988-4418 OR orders@sunstonepress.com. A digital image of the cover is available on request. (Please give specifications.)
On the cover detail from "Self-Portrait as St. Sebastian" by Egon Schiele, 1914, black crayon on paper, private collection. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York. Cover design by Vicki Abl.
click here for a Reader's Guide to The Schiele Slaughters!
KILLING FOR KLIMT
First in the Megan Crespi Series
Retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, becomes involved in a race to recover the Secretum, a “shameful, secret panel” stolen from the artist’s studio the night after his death in February of 1918. Her travels, at the behest of New York’s Moderne Galerie Museum, owner of the famed 1907 “golden” Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, take her from the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Switzerland’s Ascona, as well as to New York, Vienna, Helsinki, Paris, Montreal, and Girdwood, Alaska.
Megan is shadowed by two different assassins hired by fanatical Günther Winter. Owner of Alaska’s Alpenglow Hotel, he keeps his secret art collection in an annex basement. Several killings occur involving the interested criminal parties and naïve owners of Klimt artworks.
Finally setting up a trade—Winter’s Secretum for the golden Adele—Crespi and two colleagues fly to Alaska. They bring with them two crates: one purporting to contain the Adele portrait, and a larger one to receive the Secretum panel. But there, greed leads to unexpected and colossal consequences. Will Megan survive the final killing for Klimt?
Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, Alessandra
Comini—alias Megan Crespi—was awarded Austria’s Grand Medal of Honor for her books on Viennese artists Egon
Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Her Egon Schiele’s Portraits was nominated for the National Book Award and her The
Changing Image of Beethoven is used in classrooms around the country. Her travels,
recor
www.megancrespi.com
FOR REVIEW COPIES OR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: CARL CONDIT / (505) 988-4418 OR orders@sunstonepress.com. A digital image of the cover is available on request. (Please give specifications.)
On the Cover: Detail from a painting by Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, oil, 1907, by kind permission of the Neue Galerie Museum, New York.
click here for a Reader's Guide to Killing for Klimt!