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With His Dying Breath

About the Book:

     Rose Sweeney’s plum job hosting a graduate retreat in the remote Mendocino redwoods turns to a nightmare for the young San Francisco lit professor when she learns that a man once her mentor, but who bedded and betrayed her, will also be on staff. When Rose’s Irish fiddler husband Niall Sweeney is lured up at the last minute to teach at a folk music camp held in another part of the woodlands, they are thrown together just in time to witness the horrible demise of Rose’s betrayer. He chokes to death after playing a borrowed bagpipe, to the shock of hundreds of onlookers.

To help calm his panicky musical friends and save the camp from threat of ruin, Sweeney joins his friend Max, the camp director, in investigating the mysterious death. Max is certain that the death is part of a sinister lumber company scheme to close the camps and clear-cut the woodlands. Sweeney is left to discover why a stranger would die after playing a bagpipe that didn’t harm two other pipers. Rose is left with a more chilling puzzle—who planted evidence to link her with the murder?

The two reluctant sleuths race against time to beat the police to the truth. Adding to Rose’s fear, an obsessive student initiates a series of strange romantic overtures. Is it only a student-teacher crush gone wrong or could his connections with the death run deeper? Meanwhile, Sweeney stumbles on proof that the lumber company is willing to resort to violence to kick out the campers and log the valley.

Rose hunts through the dead man’s past in search of his murderer, led by cryptic medieval references and clues from Greek mythology, uncovering intellectual thievery, a succession of wronged women, and a bitter ex-wife. Sweeney sifts through the musicians to discover why and how a bagpipe was rigged as a murder weapon. With the unwitting help of a grizzled Irish fiddle master, he finds the crucial clue in the unlikeliest of places—in an Irish fiddle tune. Together Sweeney and Rose triangulate on the bizarre truth of a long-buried secret that might save the woodlands and of a subtle murderer with an equally subtle flaw. Armed only with circumstantial evidence, they must set a trap for the murderer in a delicate and deadly game of cat-and-mouse.