A Fatal Finale

The Diva who is not a DIVA

In Gilded Age New York, swashbuckling opera singer Ella Shane solves mysteries with her “confirmed bachelor” cousin Tommy, colorful friends, and adoring swain, the Duke. Ella, originally Ellen O’Shaugnessy, an Irish-Jewish Lower East Side orphan, found fame, fortune, and a very happy life singing the heroic male trouser roles so popular with nineteenth-century audiences. A performer and public figure she may be, but she is also a lady, who demands, literally at the point of her sword, to be treated as such. For the reader alone, she’s a bit more blunt: I’m nobody’s whore. She’s also nobody’s fool. In her debut, A FATAL FINALE, Ella is playing Romeo when her Juliet apparently drinks real poison and drops dead onstage. Soon the Duke has come to New York to find out what happened to the girl, who was his runaway cousin. They find themselves looking for a killer, and drawn together in an unavoidable, and quite possibly unresolvable, attraction. Can Ella find – and stop – the murderer? Can a diva look at a Duke…and does she even want to? We’ll find out before the final curtain...