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Miss Homicide Plays the Flute

by Brendan Connell

176 Pages

Our First Ever Limited Edition

Please note that the paperback version of this book is no longer available.

Serena Plievier, flautist by profession, superlative decadent by tendency, must subsidise her income with the mellow art of assassination in this romance of violence and harmony, of dull lists and extraordinary occurrences. Histories of sound and perversion are painted in Holland, Germany and Italy, in a Europe of decay that is accented by Mozart and has the court of Ludovico Sforza as backdrop. A relentless symphony of pleasantries and things unpleasant sketched with the inimitable style of a master’s hand.

“[Connell] is a master of language, an endlessly inventive wordsmith who writes with a poet’s eye and vision . . .”
Peter Tennant, Black Static


“Connell is nothing if not inventive, diverse and sublimely witty.”
The Agony Column

Miss Homicide Plays the Flute by Brendan Connell
Miss Homicide Plays the Flute by Brendan Connell
Miss Homicide Plays the Flute by Brendan Connell
Miss Homicide Plays the Flute by Brendan Connell

…In my opinion Miss Homicide Plays the Flute is a superb feast of extraordinary storytelling, seductive decadence and experimental strangeness. It’s a gorgeous combination of different elements and nuances that melt together and produce a beautiful and seducing symphony of sublime pleasures and perversions to readers who appreciate reading something out of the ordinary. (By the way, if you truly want to enjoy the excellence of this novel, pour yourself a glass of wine, put a CD of classical music to your CD player and press play, sit in a comfortable chair, lean back and let yourself be seduced by the story.) If you appreciate quality and good prose and read literary novels, do yourself a favour and read Miss Homicide Plays the Flute immediately. It’s a unique novel about the art of assassination and poisoning, musical instruments and history (Brendan Connell stirs these elements into a perfect mix of strange beauty and irresistable elegance). If you like thrillers, enjoy classical music, love weird stories and are fond of decandence, you won’t be disappointed by Miss Homicide Plays the Flute, because it offers all of these things and much more in an unforgettably weird package. It’s a literary treasure that awaits to be discovered by as many readers as possible. Highly recommended!

Sami Ariola - Rising Shadow

…The insanity of the story is complimented by the author’s miscellany, if miscellany is even the correct term for the odd dreams, lengthy “recipes” of murderous methodology, brief glimpses of Hell (“…and the sinners suffering therein–them being fried in great pans, chopped into little bits with huge hatchets”), lengthy descriptions of the artwork the heroine admires and overall obsession with ancient Greece (evident in passages like a description of a nightclub that devolves into a highly eccentric dissertation on Greek dance). Such things may qualify as deviations from the main narrative, or perhaps it’s the other way around. Either way this is a fascinating oddity that resembles nothing so much as itself.”

Adam Groves - The Fright Site

Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, Fast Ships, Black Sails (Nightshade Books 2008), and the World Fantasy Award winning anthologies Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). His other published books are: The Translation of Father Torturo (Prime Books, 2005), Dr. Black and the Guerrillia (Grafitisk Press, 2005), and Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2010).

 

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