With His Dying Breath

"With His Dying Breath" is the third adventure in the mystery series starring Sweeney, the unlucky Irish fiddler and his ingenious wife Rose. When San Francisco State sends mythic scholar Rose Sweeney to host a graduate literature retreat in the remote Mendocino Woodlands north of San Francisco it's her idea of heaven. But Rose's dream job quickly spins into a nightmare when her mentor and ex-lover crashes the event, then dies a horrible, very public death at the music camp next door where her husband is teaching. Deadly rumors scatter the campers, graduate students, and musicians while lumber company lawyers descend on the Woodlands to evict both camp and retreat and begin clear-cutting the redwoods. But who would rig the unlikeliest possible weapon to kill an apparent stranger? And who would then plant evidence pointing to Rose as the murderer? Sweeney and Rose scramble to discover the truth as Rose dodges the police and Sweeney's musical world rapidly crumbles. Searching separately in their worlds of myth and music, Rose and Sweeney use their very different investigative talents to converge on an astonishing secret revealing a most subtle murderer and a second menace, perhaps equally lethal. But with two lives in the balance and no tangible evidence, they must set a trap for the killer in a last, deadly game of cat-and-mouse. "A Jig Before Dying" is the first tale starring Sweeney and Rose. Fiddler Sweeney's brush with death in an Irish bar session begins an escalating cascade of violence and menace in a seedy world where everyone has something to hide. The second mystery, "Fortune Turns the Wheel" takes Rose and Sweeney to the west of England where Rose's love of myth threatens to kill them both as she realizes that some of Britain's forgotten pagan past wasn't forgotten after all.