Poor Butterfly: A Toby Peters Mystery (The Toby Peters Mysteries #15)

By: Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Synopsis: A 1940s Hollywood gumshoe heads to San Francisco to foil a very real phantom of the opera in this &“believable and entertaining&” mystery (Publishers Weekly). 1942 is a dangerous year to stage Madama Butterfly. Although Puccini&’s masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension a year after Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the production, opera buffs picket the theater, and a note appears nailed to the house door, threatening violence against cast and crew. But someone is doing more than making idle threats—a self-styled phantom of the opera. When a workman on the opera house renovation is killed, the maestro, Leopold Stokowski, the conductor who starred in Disney&’s Fantasia, calls Hollywood PI Toby Peters to catch a madman. With two days to go before opening night, the attacks are building to a crescendo. As Peters hunts for the phantom, he falls for one of the company starlets. But they must tread lightly, or face a finale far more tragic than anything dreamed of by Puccini. &“Hardly a pause separates the frightful, madly comic and nostalgic incidents made believable and entertaining in Kaminsky&’s artful handling&” (Publishers Weekly).