Nannerl's Symphony
by Paul DamienTHE HAMMER STRIKES!
Drinking herself into a stupor to avoid the horrible nightmares is the only way Julie Conway can face life…until she hears about the Hammer.
NANNERL’S SYMPHONY is an unusually chilling and thought- provoking psychological thriller that takes the reader into the tormented soul of an Atlanta district attorney in her quest to solve a series of gruesome murders. The brutal manner in which the gifted, young boys are executed earns the killer the label, the Hammer.
Chasing a lead that thrusts her into the middle of a frightening international arms conspiracy involving Russia, Julie finds her life endangered. How can the music of legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart help her? Can she prevent one more terrible murder as she races against time to the shocking conclusion of this powerful story?
SAMPLE CHAPTER
It was two hours before sunrise and Jacobs wanted to get his cans into the recycling office. It wasn’t much, four cents a can, but Jacobs, like thousands of others, was black and homeless in Georgia and he needed every cent he could get. It was another warm and muggy night in Atlanta and Jacobs’ beat-up Chevy choked as he tried to park it a little closer to the recycling bin. Muttering under his breath, he walked the rest of the distance. He pushed the plastic bag aside to reach for the cans. “Why don’t ’em folks leave the trash where it belongs?” He rubbed his hands against his worn-out overalls to rid them of some of the remaining soda. Suddenly, he froze.
Under the bug infested light he saw what appeared to be a leg sticking out from the bag, the still toes clawing at the cans. Bending over, he peered closely, and his breath left his body. It was a human foot. Panicking, he reached out to push it back in, but it seemed to have a life of its own and slipped into his hand. He let out a small scream and fell to the ground.
Detective Sergeant Richardson was with an angry jogger who, upon finding the two bodies, had called 911. “Officer, I tell you the man was on the ground when I saw him.”
“We need to ask him a few questions,” Richardson said to the uniformed male medic who was trying to revive Jacobs.
“He won’t be up for a while. The poor bastard’s suffered a stroke.”
Second Officer Foley, who looked like he could use some medical help of his own, took Richardson by the arm and led him out of earshot. “Sergeant, I think we better wake up the Chief on this one. That’s one ugly sight back there.” He gestured towards a second female medic.
“Get a grip on yourself, Foley. Tanner will have a fit if we get him up now.”
His words fell on ears that were nearly touching the ground as Officer Foley doubled over and vomited, his half-digested donut attacked ravenously by crawling ants.
Richardson walked up to the woman who was wrapping up the body. “What have we got?”
“A young boy. I’d say about seven, Caucasian. He’s been dead for about six, maybe seven hours.”
The medic looked at the jogger who wandered over to the ambulance. Richardson snapped at him to wait for him by the squad car. He turned and stripped the sheet from the body.
Paul Damien was born in India and earned a PhD in Mathematics from Imperial College, London. He began his academic and writing career at Duke University. He then moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he was tenured. The thrill from doing giddy mathematics resulted in a long hiatus from writing, but not before he had published one novel, Death at C Minor, re-released as Nannerl’s Symphony (2013). Even during this fiction writing withdrawal, he felt compelled to find time to publish a humorous exposé of self-help pundits in Help! Debunking the Outrageous Claims of Self-Help Gurus (2008).
In addition to having lived on three continents, at universities he had the convenient advantage of exploring the world while attending conferences that provided silage for several books.
Says Damien, “It wasn’t my intention to take such a long break from fiction. Academic research interfered in a good way, for it demanded disciplined thinking and cogent communication,” while adding, “it is tyrannical people get pigeon-holed into specializations. In this age of somatic multi-tasking why shouldn’t we multi-idea?” He continues, “Could you imagine what Newton or Richard Feynman would have done with smart phones? But I guess there’s already an app for that.”
Having recently completed the thriller, The Gershwin Cutter, he is working on two more at the moment.
An avid cook and a skilled martial artist, Damien is currently on the faculty at the University of Texas in Austin. When he’s not working or sipping a martini, you can find him jogging on Austin’s Shoal Creek Trail with his Alsatian, Raja.