Title: The Green Muse: An Edouard Mas Novel
Author: Jessie Prichard Hunter
Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Historical
Release
Date: February 3, 2015
Publisher: Witness Impulse an imprint of HarperCollins
~Synopsis~
In Belle Époque Paris, the morgue is the place to see and be seen …
"This morning I was called upon to photograph the dead again." So begins the story of Edouard Mas, a photographer's assistant with a detective's soul. Edouard's job is to take pictures of corpses before they are carted off to the Paris Morgue. If the bodies are unidentified, they will be put behind glass for the whole city to view, in a morbid display of lost and found.
Edouard begins to come across more and more bodies stripped of their identification and laid out in methodical poses, and he knows he is dealing with those who dabble in art—the art of death. The morgue—their museum.
Edouard's investigation takes him from the sterile halls of La Salpêtrière to the opulent, smoke-filled soirees of high society, but he must do everything in his power to stop the artists of death, before they go after somebody he loves …
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How
The Green Muse Became “An Edouard Mas
Novel.”
The Green Muse wasn’t originally “An Edouard Mas
Novel.” The novel belonged, at its inception, to Charles and V. Edouard played
an important part, of course: Without him Charles and V would not have been
stopped, and Augustine would not have been saved.
I
had known all along that I wanted one character in the book to be the perfect
Victorian gentleman, the man who saves the day. But I wanted no milktoast. I
wanted no man of action without reflection. What I like most about Edouard is
the way he faces his temptations head-on and clear-eyed, whether the temptation
is an irresistible woman or the very human temptation not to care.
Edouard cares. He cares
passionately, about the dead as well as the living. I respect his insistence on
doing them both justice.
But
his role was strictly as a supporting actor. It wasn’t until after I finished
the book that I realized Edouard was my favorite character. I thought nothing
of this, really. Every author has a secret favorite. Imagine my surprise, then,
when everybody else liked him best too!
The challenge became how to make
this Edouard’s book. I had written the chapters in a strict A-B-C format, with
Charles’ voice first, then Edouard’s, then Augustine’s. I simply did not know
what to do.
My husband came up with the very
simple solution. (His advice, when I was working on One, Two, Buckle My Shoe and came to an impasse, was, “Kill somebody
off.” So I killed off Mr. Linderman and got another hundred pages for the
book.) This time he suggested simply switching the order of the chapters so
that Edouard’s voice is the first you hear. So the first sentence of the book
becomes, “This morning I was called upon to photograph the dead again.” Which
is, he pointed out, “a real Hunter first sentence.”
And it was that simple, really. In
reordering the chapters and putting the emphasis on Edouard’s voice rather than
Charles’, it became Edouard’s book; I only had to fill out his character a
little, let him think out loud a little more, have him make crucial connections
with less serendipity and more concrete thought.
And it left me with a better book. Which
I dedicated, of course, to my husband.
About the Author
Jessie Prichard Hunter is the author of the psychological thriller Blood Music, forthcoming from Witness Impulse. She currently resides in New York's Hudson Valley with her husband and two children.
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