The Coffee Garden: A Musical Mystery Featuring Johann Sebastian Bach

Bach is back and investigating another musical mystery!

In this second novel in the Bach Musical Mystery series, award-winning historical novelist James Y. Bartlett has taken the real-life incident that Bach scholars call 'the Prefect Affair' and kicked it up a few notches into a musical whodunit.

When Bach's First Prefect - the student leader at the St. Thomas School in charge of the main choir - suddenly disappears after an ugly incident at a wedding, the school's headmaster moves to appoint his favorite student to the position, over Bach's objections.

While the City Council mulls over the conflict between the two, Bach, his cousin and advisor Elias Bach and Bach's wife Anna Magdalena Bach search Leipzig for the missing boy. All while Bach is preparing for the summer concert series he conducts in the Coffee Garden outside the city walls. And his daughter Dörte begins a friendship with a controversial woman poet.

In the end, truth becomes known, scores are settled, and Bach conducts a triumphant concert in the Coffee Garden before the King himself, featuring Anna Magdalena, once a promising professional singer herself.

Bach scholars' heads may explode over Bartlett's audacity in creating this new Bach persona, but music and mystery lovers alike will delight in this contrapuntal story set in 18th century Germany.