Music professor Gus LeGarde has been happily married to his second wife, Camille, years after his first wife, Elsbeth, leapt to her death from the Letchworth Gorge cliffs. But when he starts seeing a woman around town who looks exactly like Elsbeth, his marriage and sanity are thrown into chaos.
Is she a ghost? A figment of his imagination? Or has there been some kind of horrible mistake, and could Elsbeth still be alive?
As if the shock of glimpsing his dead wife, seemingly in the flesh, weren’t enough, the LeGarde household is struggling with the arrival of strange new neighbors. The Silvermans are secretive and unapproachable from the start—patriarch Ezekiel is hostile and threatening, his adult daughter Serena is clearly terrified, and her teenage son Eli shows signs of abuse. At first they avoid the troubled family, but that becomes impossible when Gus’ daughter, Shelby, starts falling for Eli.
After a string of dangerous events culminates in the elder Silverman holding a shotgun on the two teens when discovered in flagrante delicato, Gus forbids Shelby from seeing the boy. But soon after things are broken off, Shelby and Eli abruptly vanish, plunging both families into panic.
As the Silvermans’ dark past is slowly revealed, Shelby’s life hangs in the balance. Just how far will this family go to protect their secrets?
USA Today Bestselling Author Aaron Paul Lazar writes to soothe his soul. Author of 28 books, including three addictive mystery series, writing books, a romantic suspense series, and a new love story series, Aaron enjoys the Genesee Valley countryside in upstate New York, where his characters embrace life, play with their dogs and grandkids, grow sumptuous gardens, and chase bad guys. Visit his website at http://www.lazarbooks.com. Aaron has won 21 book awards for his novels and finds writing to be his form of "cheap therapy." Feel free to network with him on Facebook or his website; he loves to connect with readers!
Aaron Paul Lazar wasn’t always a mystery writer. It wasn’t until eight members of his family and friends died within five years that the urge to write became overwhelming. “When my father died, I lost it. I needed an outlet, and writing provided the kind of solace I couldn’t find elsewhere.”
Lazar created the Gus LeGarde mystery series, with the founding novel, DOUBLE FORTÉ (2004), a chilling winter mystery set in the Genesee Valley of upstate New York. Like Lazar’s father, protagonist Gus LeGarde is a classical music professor. Gus, a grandfather, gardener, chef, and nature lover, plays Chopin etudes to feed his soul and thinks of himself as a “Renaissance man caught in the 21st century.”
The creation of the series lent Lazar the comfort he sought, yet in the process, a new passion was unleashed. Obsessed with his parallel universe, he now lives, breathes, and dreams about his characters, and has written eleven LeGarde mysteries.
One day while rototilling his gardens, Lazar unearthed a green cat’s eye marble, which prompted the new paranormal mystery series featuring Sam Moore, retired country doctor and zealous gardener. The green marble, a powerful talisman, connects all three of the books in the series, whisking Sam back in time to uncover his brother’s dreadful fate fifty years earlier. (THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BILLY MOORE; TERROR COMES KNOCKING, and FOR KEEPS) Lazar intends to continue both series, in addition to three contemporary new series including Tall Pines Mysteries, set in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains, Paines Creek love stories series, set on Cape Cod, and Bittersweet Hollow romantic suspense series, set in Vermont.
Lazar’s books feature breathless chase scenes, nasty villains, and taut suspense, but are also intensely human stories, replete with kids, dogs, horses, food, romance, and humor. The author calls them, “country mysteries,” although reviewers have dubbed them “literary mysteries.”
“It seems as though every image ever impressed upon my brain finds its way into my work. Whether it’s the light dancing through stained-glass windows in a Parisian chapel, curly slate-green lichen covering a boulder at the edge of a pond in Maine, or hoarfrost dangling from a cherry tree branch in mid-winter, these images burrow into my memory cells. In time they bubble back, persistently itching, until they are poured out on the page.”
Lazar lives on a ridge overlooking the Genesee Valley in upstate New York with his wife, mother-in-law, beloved Cavi-poo, Balto, Cavi-bichon, Amber, and four cats. He and his wife, Dale, now have seven grandchildren to spoil and they enjoy every second of it!
I love Aaron Paul Lazar’s Gus LeGarde mysteries, so I was delighted to find a new one available. From music appreciation to pitch-perfect dialog (filled with verve and humor),and from great relationships between people to a wonderful relationship with place and scenery, it’s a fascinating story and enthralling mystery, delightfully told. The author cleverly hints at past events, with just enough detail to entice new readers while dancing on the memories of those who’ve followed LeGarde’s life of mystery and love.
All the familiar characters are here—even some unexpected ones—and all with the sort of gentle depth that well-chosen details bring. The scenery and sounds draw the reader in. The threat and mystery tug at the heart. And the chapter endings have that aching, can’t-put-it-down feel that will have readers continuing to read late into the night. Plus there’s danger, of course. Gus LeGarde leaves a life that always seems to tip onto the edge of danger.
The Return is a beautiful story with history and promise of a future, a delightful story of family lives and relationships, and a really good read. I loved it.
Disclosure: I was lucky enough to be offered a pre-release copy—I couldn’t resist.
When the past won’t be laid to rest, The Return brings it back full circle.
Written with a romantic, heart-rending touch in the signature style of Aaron Paul Lazar, The Return loops back to the beginning of the series, when Music professor Gus LeGarde could not find any consolation for the death of his wife Elsbeth. Now happily married to Camille, his newfound happiness is shattered when a woman who resembles his dead wife is spotted around town. Could Elsbeth be alive? If so, what will her return mean to his new family?
At the same time, he struggles to accept his daughter’s young love to Eli Silverman, son of his secretive new neighbors. Gus forbids Shelby from seeing the boy, and when she vanishes, he not only prays for her safe return but heads the rescue himself.
The story celebrates also the surprise return of a long lost piece of art. As befits the title, the story brings back all the characters from the entire series, celebrating their return as well and suggesting this is a farewell to the series.
I was lucky enough to be offered an ARC and offer my feedback. Highly recommended. Five stars.
This book was much better than the 3 stars i gave it. The lower rating is solely because of the very end of the book. I'll explain later. The book itself is about a widowed music professor and his family who live a quiet life on a farmstead next door to his best childhood friend and his family. Two things come into his life that shake things up. First, he thinks he sees his dead wife wandering about town and secondly, a strange family moves in next door who seem to be hiding out from someone. Both story lines are interesting and well written and i enjoyed following the plots to the very end. The problem i had with the book is that this is the 13th book in the series and presumably the last and the author decided to let all the memorable characters from his previous books show up at the tail end of this book to do a sort of curtain call. Not having read any of the other books, this was totally wasted on me. All of a sudden he's introducing a bunch of new characters in the very last chapters. It made no sense to this story. I'm sure it was fun for the author to tie all of his books up in one big bow at the end of the series, but it ruined a perfectly good book.
According to Wikipedia, a cozy mystery is a gentle story where violence, sex, and crime take place mostly through hints rather than explicitly and where small country communities are central to the storyline. I think it’s fair to say that Aaron Paul Lazar’s Gus LeGarde mystery series is the epitome of cozy. While the books themselves are full of all the suspense, intensity and intrigue of any mystery – there is plenty of murder, mayhem, sex and violence and the stakes are high, but the work is never explicit, and there is a gentleness deeply embedded into the work. Here the local fictional community of ‘East Goodland’ in the Genesee Valley is very much centre stage with its winding rivers, waterfalls, woodlands and bucolic scenery. There is also music, which provides the backdrop to the story. As a music professor, Gus LeGarde is a talented player as are the many friends and colleagues who congregate around him:
"Byron wooed the crowd with his lyrical arias. He began with “Una furtiva lagrima” from L’Elisir D’Amore by Donizetti. While it seemed impossible that he could possibly top that one, he launched into “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot, by Puccini. I glanced up and noticed Shelby practically swooning in the front row beside Camille. For that matter, the entire crowd was captivated. He built to a heart-wrenching version of “Che gelida manina” from La Bohéme by Puccini."
Then there is the garden and the delicious food that Gus cooks with his abundance of garden produce and keen sense of culinary scents (I’m hoping Lazar creates a Gus LeGarde cookbook next):
"I’d picked a dozen ripe red tomatoes earlier and had put the whole thing together at six in the morning. My recipe was always the same, including hamburger, canned kidney beans, a whole Vidalia onion, five cloves of garlic, beef stock, and spices galore. Cumin was the most important of them all, notwithstanding the chili powder, of course. The house was redolent with the aroma, and I could barely contain my desire for a cup."
Gus is a man whose decency shines through whatever mishaps he finds himself in and he does indeed find himself embroiled in all sorts of problems. The Return is the 13th book in the series, in which Gus’ beloved first wife Elsbeth, who died many years ago, has suddenly begun appearing around the town. When Elsbeth’s twin, Gus’ longtime friend Sigfried, also spots Elsbeth, Gus knows it’s not just his imagination. He’s confused and his current wife Camille is worried about what a return of Elsbeth will mean for their relationship. But Gus is also worried about his eighteen year old daughter Shelby’s new relationship with the odd boy who has moved into the old Marggrander homestead next door. Gus has to use all of his sleuthing skills and Camille’s expert negotiation skills to once again save the day.
The book is fast paced, drawing you in from the first chapter, and progressing with exciting turns in a way that the book is always pleasurable and satisfying, and even the worst antagonists are treated with empathy. It’s hard not to like Gus, who is always ready to lend a helping hand or a basket of fresh picked zucchinis and corn. Lazar is a master craftsman and pays careful attention to language, plot, pacing and character so that all of the elements tie together neatly and seamlessly, description charged with rich nostalgia:
"I leaned on the cool painted post and gazed at the silhouette of the barn against the diamond-studded sky. Crickets and tree peepers sang in the woods, as if denying the end of summer. I inhaled the fragrance of late summer roses wafting in the night air, the climbing yellow variety Elsbeth planted when we were first married. Now they engulfed the porch and grew up the trellis as if they were reaching for Heaven."
As the title makes clear, a lot of threads from other LeGarde mysteries come into this one and while you don’t need to have read any of the previous books to follow—Lazar takes great care to provide back story every time a character is introduced in a way that feels natural—it does add to the enjoyment to know who the person is, what they went through, and the extent of their connection with Gus and his family. There are all sorts of easter eggs for fans of the series and I won’t give any of them away but some additional bits of treasure include rare and hidden paintings, secret passages, Chopin of course, and also, just for The Return, Queen, whose music is woven throughout the story.
There’s so much to like about The Return. For those new to Gus LeGarde, this book is not a bad place to start because it brings together a lot of the plot lines from previous books without requiring previous knowledge, though of course you can also start at the beginning of the series, which moves back and forth in time—a lot happens in the thirteen books! What really makes these books “cozy” in the best sense of the word is that they are a celebration of family, kindness, and camaraderie. The plot is driven forward by the way the characters support one another in non-judgemental, open-hearted ways. The book is never syrupy – in fact there are all sorts of really awful things that happen, not least of which Elsbeth’s death which, though in the past, colours the present with a rupture that clearly hasn’t healed. There is pain, trauma, fear, and deep-seated anger in some of the characters. But what is overwhelming is the way Gus interacts with both his extended family—his grandchildren, children, partner and friends, and how that care extends itself outward into a kind of philosophy that colours all of the work.
This is one of my favorite series. It’s a warm comfortable experience to read one of these books. I love the family, how they get along, the descriptions of the food, the descriptions of the garden and flowers. Through this series I’ve learned a lot about music and gardening. There’s a scene in the book where he waxes poetic about fresh, sweet corn. I also love food and the way his characters love it combined with family. I feel the same way. I understand the creative need to do different things, but reading a Gus story is like reconnecting with a friend I haven’t seen in a while over a nice home cooked meal.
Another great book by one of my favorite mystery authors. I have read several of Aaron Paul Lazar's compelling novels. They never disappoint. As always, I loved the familiar exceptional characters, the action-filled twisty plot, and the use of appealing to all five senses.
The references to the music from Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody were fun and had me singing along to each title mentioned.
Like several other readers, I hope this won't be the last book of the LeGarde Mystery series. I would miss my friends as I have come to think of these well developed characters.
The Return is a wonderful addition to the Gus LeGarde series.
Very suspenseful and a bit spooky, it had me almost biting my nails as the appearance of a mysterious family nearby threatened the life of one of Gus's family while another spooky mystery made Gus question his own sanity.
As always, Aaron Paul Lazar has woven a tale filled with lovable characters, suspense and romance, that will make you fall in love with his books all over again.
The Return would make a wonderful movie! It has a loving family, suspense, history of art and music and so much more. One of Aaron’s best books and I read every book in each of his series. Thankful to have known Aaron for over 30 years. I miss his writing new books but very pleased that he is sharing his knowledge by helping other writers.
As always this series delivers both with the narration and the story. I just escape into a different world listening to this series. I also learn a lot about music which I thought I would never be interested in.
Has Elsbeth returned from the dead? Her being seen around town tests Gus’ sanity. Who is the reclusive family that bought the Marrgrander family farm that will go to any length to protect their secret?
The Return (LeGarde Mysteries Book 13) by Aaron Lazar
Aaron Lazar is one of my favorite authors, top three for sure. And The Return...Oh My Heavens! I have often wondered how this exact scenario (with Elsbeth) would play out. Sprinkle in some mystery, some mayhem, and some sugar for the chili for the win. Lazar brings this wonderful cast of characters together and within minutes I am falling in love all over again. All of the details in their lives makes me one of the family too. I can even hear the singing. Here is another classic in the making.
2023-Listened to the new Audible version. Just wonderful! I have so much love for this family.