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Mozart's Last Aria
Matt Rees
#UE8812 Paperback, 303 pages; 2011 $14.99
Members' Price: $12.74

  Three years have passed since Maria Anna "Nannerl" Berchtold von Sonnenburg last received word from Vienna. When a letter finally does arrive, it delivers the worst possible news: Her estranged brother, the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is dead. Devastated, Nannerl rushes to Vienna to pay her respects. Yet her grief takes on a new urgency when she learns that, in his final days, Wolfgang suspected he had been poisoned. Was it murder? Or were his suspicions the delusions of a fevered genius? Nannerl sets out to uncover the truth, drawing on her own skills as an accomplished musician to penetrate her brother's inner circle. There she learns of a conspiracy within the exclusive Masonic brotherhood, a dark secret that may conceal the answer to Wolfgang's death. Set against the snowy backdrop of an imperial Austrian winter, this splendid novel of music and mystery makes for excellent cold-weather reading. (KG)