| Title: |
Mask for a Diva (#4 in the Stan Kraychik series) |
 |
| Author: |
Grant Michaels |
| Published by: |
St. Martin's Press, 1994 |
| ISBN: |
0-312-11462-1 [hardcover, 296 pages] |
Opera lovers, rejoice! The shameful void in Boston's
great musical sphere is about to come to an end -- with the inaugural season
of the New England Summer opera Festival in Boston's North Shore. For the
main event, Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, the festival has engaged
the famed Italian diva Marcella Ostinata, an aging soprano whose fiery
temperament and lust for drama only partially offsets her lack of secure
high notes. Stan Kraychik, the Newbury Street hairdresser par excellence
and a devout hater of all things operatic, has been hired to assist the
wig master of the brand-new opera house in Abigail-by-the-Sea.
But the lurch toward opening night is interrupted by a ghastly murder,
one that threatens to cancel not only the opening night but possibly the
entire festival as well. Stan, never one to mind his own business anyway,
finds himself enlisted by his old sometime cohort and sometime nemesis
Lt. Vito Branco of the Boston police department to be his eyes and ears
inside the festival. Stan quickly finds himself playing a crucial role
in a deadly grand opera without music, set offstage with real weapons and
a real killer.
