Publisher's Synopsis
Fiction. California Interest. Myra Scar lies murdered on the floor of her gourmet restaurant, stabbed in the back with one eye cut out. The Chief of Police of Paso Robles will not find her killer by interrogating Patton August, the deceitful slacker who waits tables. He won't find the killer by digging up dirt on Jackson Judy, a brilliant Sommelier whose life is governed by a sequence of magic numbers. But if he traces this murder back to its roots to a village in Alsace, 230 years ago, where a pioneering winemaker tried to save an exquisite Gewurtztraminer vine from Franco-German warfare then he might find something that resembles the truth. If Edgar Allan Poe recited John Steinbeck's East of Eden while drunk on California wine, it would sound like J. M. Geever's first novel, THE BLACK CAT. A murder mystery and multi-generational family saga filled with transvestite vintners, obscure European wars, cats who walk upright, vengeful ghosts, and fine wine, THE BLACK CAT introduces the world to a captivating new voice in literature."
