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Sheet Music
From a seductive storyteller who dares to plumb the dark, passionate depths of the heart and soul comes an absorbing erotic thriller that is also a gripping tale of psychological suspense.
Grief-stricken Justine Pagett fled to Paris after her mother’s death, but scandal forced her back to the States to redeem her tarnished reputation as a journalist. Commissioned to write a piece on the eccentric classical composer Sophie DeLyon, Justine travels to Euphonia, the exclusive institution DeLyon created to nurture America’s most gifted music prodigies. Once there, she senses that a malevolent presence is composing a deadly work. When Sophie suddenly disappears, Justine’s assignment to mine the story behind the legend becomes an even greater challenge. Wrestling with her own demons while searching for the truth, Justine is clear about one thing: Someone is orchestrating a deadly deceit . . . from which no one will emerge unscathed.
Grief-stricken Justine Pagett fled to Paris after her mother’s death, but scandal forced her back to the States to redeem her tarnished reputation as a journalist. Commissioned to write a piece on the eccentric classical composer Sophie DeLyon, Justine travels to Euphonia, the exclusive institution DeLyon created to nurture America’s most gifted music prodigies. Once there, she senses that a malevolent presence is composing a deadly work. When Sophie suddenly disappears, Justine’s assignment to mine the story behind the legend becomes an even greater challenge. Wrestling with her own demons while searching for the truth, Justine is clear about one thing: Someone is orchestrating a deadly deceit . . . from which no one will emerge unscathed.
326 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
9 people are currently reading
199 people want to read
About the author
M.J. Rose
89 books2,291 followersNew York Times Bestseller, M.J. Rose grew up in New York City mostly in the labyrinthine galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, the dark tunnels and lush gardens of Central Park and reading her mother's favorite books before she was allowed. She believes mystery and magic are all around us but we are too often too busy to notice... books that exaggerate mystery and magic draw attention to it and remind us to look for it and revel in it.
Her most recent novel, The Last Tiara, will be published Feb 2, 2021
Rose's work has appeared in many magazines including Oprah Magazine and she has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, WSJ, Time, USA Today and on the Today Show, and NPR radio. Rose graduated from Syracuse University, spent the '80s in advertising, has a commercial in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and since 2005 has run the first marketing company for authors - Authorbuzz.com
The television series PAST LIFE, was based on Rose's novels in the Reincarnationist series. She is one of the founding board members of International Thriller Writers and currently serves, with Lee Child, as the organization's co-president..
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 22, 2016
Justine Pagett is an unusually sensual woman. The warm, butter-and-sugar smells of fresh baking, the smokey blackberry taste of vintage cabernet, the breath-stealing sting of the wind on her cheeks as her sailboat skims the waves, the teasing sensation of brandy dribbling down across her naked breasts, Justine experiences all these sensations with fierce, almost frightening, intensity. Justine is a woman who orgasms standing in a doorway, listening to her lover play his cello half a room away.
Not only does she feel these things, she describes them with awesome clarity. She is a keen observer of her environment and her fellow humans, a professional journalist, a "wordsmith", as her father calls her at the age of ten.
The intriguingly complex protagonist of M.J. Rose's novel Sheet Music, Justine cannot help succumbing to the lure of her senses. She hardly tries to resist. She struggles valiantly, though, to decouple her senses from her emotions, to distance her body from her heart. She leaves lovers precisely at the moment when they become attached to her. She shuns her father and sister, blaming them for her mother's unhappiness and early death. She lives a cold, lonely, empty life in Paris, deliberately seeking out the ambiguous comfort of purely physical release, allowing herself true passion only in the realm of her career.
Sensation and emotion are intricately linked, however, and Justine cannot escape from either grief or love. Sights and smells constantly reanimate memories of her mother, a chef who initiated Justine into the sweet mysteries of the palate when Justine was still a child. And when a writing assignment brings her back into the life of cellist-composer Austen Bell, she rediscovers an irresistible emotional connection that goes far beyond their incandescent physical couplings.
Justine is a woman living a lie, or trying to, desperate to sever any emotional attachments for fear that she will fall prey to the weakness she saw in her mother: loving too much. She uses words as a weapon to push away the emotions clamoring for her attention, having discovered as a child that "the process of thinking about what word described my feeling took my mind off the feeling." For the three years since her mother's death from cancer, she has managed to maintain a facade of detachment, brutally suppressing the grief that periodically overwhelms her. As she begins research for a biography of the celebrated composer and conductor Sophie de Lyon, though, her mask begins to disintegrate.
Returning to New York from her self-sought exile in Paris, she is forced to deal with her family, living and dead. Meanwhile, she receives ominous threats warning her against writing about Sophie, and the presence of Austen Bell (Sophie's student and ex-son-in-law) wakens a yearning in her that she cannot ignore. Grief, anger, love and fear roil beneath her polished surface, finally reaching a crisis when Sophie mysteriously disappears.
The character of Sophie mirrors and illumines Justine's nature. Like Justine, Sophie is exquisitely sensual and voraciously sexual. The mansion she has made into her music academy, Euphonia, is a fantasy castle perched at the ocean's edge, the walls encrusted with seashells, the gardens a riot of color and scent, every detail personally chosen by its mistress. Sophie is beloved and notorious, a force of nature as much as a woman. Justine senses that there are secrets lurking behind Sophie's public personna. As she investigates, she is drawn into a maze of seduction, deception and danger where her defenses gradually erode.
Sophie never actually appears in the story. We understand her only through the effects she has had on other people, through her work, and through the stories others tell of her. As Justine sifts the truth from the lies, she opens herself for the first time to her own truth and the truth about her mother, who has become, in Justine's memory, as much a mythical figure as Sophie.
Sheet Music is compelling psychological study, a family drama, a thriller. It does not belong to the conventional genre of erotica, but Ms. Rose conveys Justine's sexual intensity as vividly as she portrays her heroine's stunningly painful grief. She shares Justine's dreams and fantasies, dreams of her body being played like a cello by an unseen man, fantasies replaying what might have happened as she and Austen sat together in his car, when he didn't touch her, but he might have... Justine wants to believe that physical desire is all that matters, but she can't, quite:
"I've always thought of kisses as being of the night, of the darkness. But I glimpse colors and light moving in time to music when his lips are on me. The colors move inside me, relieving me of gravity. I might lift off in this light."
Then in the next breath:
"I pull back, break the connection. I've made a mistake and have to undo it."
Sheet Music uses food as shorthand for emotional and physical intensity. In the very first paragraph, Justine says of a lover, a famous chef who creates fabulously sensual "postcoital feasts":
"He knows I am always hungry. He doesn't know that, no matter what I eat, I am never full."
The book offers a feast of many flavors: the bitterness of regret, the saltiness of desire, the sweetness of love, the sour taste of desperation. Justine uses the vocabulary of the senses to convey the nuances of the heart.
There's a whiff of tragedy in Sheet Music. Justine comes perilously close to losing her self, losing a chance for fulfillment, reconciliation, forgiveness. Her fatal flaw? Blindness, perhaps, or arrogance (knowing she is clever enough to manipulate people, she does not hesitate to do so). Reading Sheet Music, seeing the world through her eyes, I wanted to shake her, to remind her that her acute senses and emotional intensity were a gift, not a burden. Ultimately, though, my sympathy for her overwhelmed my annoyance. She suffers, and finally experiences some kind of redemption. A reader can hardly ask for more.
Not only does she feel these things, she describes them with awesome clarity. She is a keen observer of her environment and her fellow humans, a professional journalist, a "wordsmith", as her father calls her at the age of ten.
The intriguingly complex protagonist of M.J. Rose's novel Sheet Music, Justine cannot help succumbing to the lure of her senses. She hardly tries to resist. She struggles valiantly, though, to decouple her senses from her emotions, to distance her body from her heart. She leaves lovers precisely at the moment when they become attached to her. She shuns her father and sister, blaming them for her mother's unhappiness and early death. She lives a cold, lonely, empty life in Paris, deliberately seeking out the ambiguous comfort of purely physical release, allowing herself true passion only in the realm of her career.
Sensation and emotion are intricately linked, however, and Justine cannot escape from either grief or love. Sights and smells constantly reanimate memories of her mother, a chef who initiated Justine into the sweet mysteries of the palate when Justine was still a child. And when a writing assignment brings her back into the life of cellist-composer Austen Bell, she rediscovers an irresistible emotional connection that goes far beyond their incandescent physical couplings.
Justine is a woman living a lie, or trying to, desperate to sever any emotional attachments for fear that she will fall prey to the weakness she saw in her mother: loving too much. She uses words as a weapon to push away the emotions clamoring for her attention, having discovered as a child that "the process of thinking about what word described my feeling took my mind off the feeling." For the three years since her mother's death from cancer, she has managed to maintain a facade of detachment, brutally suppressing the grief that periodically overwhelms her. As she begins research for a biography of the celebrated composer and conductor Sophie de Lyon, though, her mask begins to disintegrate.
Returning to New York from her self-sought exile in Paris, she is forced to deal with her family, living and dead. Meanwhile, she receives ominous threats warning her against writing about Sophie, and the presence of Austen Bell (Sophie's student and ex-son-in-law) wakens a yearning in her that she cannot ignore. Grief, anger, love and fear roil beneath her polished surface, finally reaching a crisis when Sophie mysteriously disappears.
The character of Sophie mirrors and illumines Justine's nature. Like Justine, Sophie is exquisitely sensual and voraciously sexual. The mansion she has made into her music academy, Euphonia, is a fantasy castle perched at the ocean's edge, the walls encrusted with seashells, the gardens a riot of color and scent, every detail personally chosen by its mistress. Sophie is beloved and notorious, a force of nature as much as a woman. Justine senses that there are secrets lurking behind Sophie's public personna. As she investigates, she is drawn into a maze of seduction, deception and danger where her defenses gradually erode.
Sophie never actually appears in the story. We understand her only through the effects she has had on other people, through her work, and through the stories others tell of her. As Justine sifts the truth from the lies, she opens herself for the first time to her own truth and the truth about her mother, who has become, in Justine's memory, as much a mythical figure as Sophie.
Sheet Music is compelling psychological study, a family drama, a thriller. It does not belong to the conventional genre of erotica, but Ms. Rose conveys Justine's sexual intensity as vividly as she portrays her heroine's stunningly painful grief. She shares Justine's dreams and fantasies, dreams of her body being played like a cello by an unseen man, fantasies replaying what might have happened as she and Austen sat together in his car, when he didn't touch her, but he might have... Justine wants to believe that physical desire is all that matters, but she can't, quite:
"I've always thought of kisses as being of the night, of the darkness. But I glimpse colors and light moving in time to music when his lips are on me. The colors move inside me, relieving me of gravity. I might lift off in this light."
Then in the next breath:
"I pull back, break the connection. I've made a mistake and have to undo it."
Sheet Music uses food as shorthand for emotional and physical intensity. In the very first paragraph, Justine says of a lover, a famous chef who creates fabulously sensual "postcoital feasts":
"He knows I am always hungry. He doesn't know that, no matter what I eat, I am never full."
The book offers a feast of many flavors: the bitterness of regret, the saltiness of desire, the sweetness of love, the sour taste of desperation. Justine uses the vocabulary of the senses to convey the nuances of the heart.
There's a whiff of tragedy in Sheet Music. Justine comes perilously close to losing her self, losing a chance for fulfillment, reconciliation, forgiveness. Her fatal flaw? Blindness, perhaps, or arrogance (knowing she is clever enough to manipulate people, she does not hesitate to do so). Reading Sheet Music, seeing the world through her eyes, I wanted to shake her, to remind her that her acute senses and emotional intensity were a gift, not a burden. Ultimately, though, my sympathy for her overwhelmed my annoyance. She suffers, and finally experiences some kind of redemption. A reader can hardly ask for more.
October 2, 2020
An immediately engaging story built around truly unique characters. A mystery (almost) to the very end, but the reader is provided with more perspective than the characters, and following them as they come to terms with the truth is quite rewarding.
October 16, 2017
3.5 Sheet Music kom nie by haar Butterfield-reeks nie, maar die manier waarop MJ Rose musiek omskakel in woorde is merkwaardig. Haar beskrywings is meer as bloot sintuiglik, jy hóór die musiek iewers in jou lyf. Jy luister anders na die klassieke meesters na die lees van hierdie boek. Rose neem erotiek verder as bloot die lyflike; haar beskrywings van kos, musiek, ruimtes is nie net eroties nie, maar laat mens met 'n "longing" vir meer. Verhale soos hierdie een omskep die leser in 'n voyeur wat inkyk op die privaat en intieme wêreld van kuns, musiek en kos.
March 6, 2024
I really enjoyed this book. I wanted to gobble it greedily in one session but instead I savored it slowly in bite sized morsels. Beautifully written with well constructed phrases. Food, music,Paris...swirling descriptions which took me along with the main character. The intricacies of relationships with family and lovers are explored and are at the heart of a book which delights and proves a satisfying read to the end.
December 2, 2018
+++A suspenseful book about an emotionally damaged reporter and how so many of her interview subjects are also in that boat. Strained family ties, professional ties and personal ties abound. A bird's eye view of the terrible injuries we humans so unknowingly inflict on each other. Main characters are Justine Pagett, her best friend Fiona, her mother Pauline an author & cook, her father a chef, her sister Maddie a chef and ex alcoholic & addict, an ex lover & musician Austen Bell, his son Charlie and the composer, director, teacher & diva Sophie DeLyon & her children Daphne & Stephen & in laws.+++
March 4, 2020
This is not my favorite book by this author. The story dragged on a bit and the pathos of all the characters was wearying. That said, I will continue to read everything this author writes.
February 1, 2014
Gotta say didn't love this book, wasn't really getting along with the heroine. A journalist who will, seemingly, do anything for a story and is a tad underhanded.
Her beloved, holy, unblemished, chef Mother dies which leaves her so grief-stricken to moves to France and cuts the rest of the family out of her life.
After she disgraces her lover with an expose she buggers off back to the USA.
Here she starts working on a biographical story on a famous female musician/composer/teacher.
She moves into the school over the summer to get some background information, but before she even manages to meet this woman the composer disappears.
I don't know just didn't grab me. I loved the Halo Effect from this writer, but could feel no empathy for out heroine.
Justine was totally devastated by her Mother's death and it felt like every other page we were being told about her idyllic life with her mother and how now, as a grown up she was not functioning without her. And we were told again and again (I get it). OK so, her Dad should have left her Mum at home so Justine could say farewell instead of zipping her off to the funeral home.
Maybe the book should have had a bit more editing to tighten it up. There are some nice sex scenes but I don't actually think I'd call this erotic.
Her beloved, holy, unblemished, chef Mother dies which leaves her so grief-stricken to moves to France and cuts the rest of the family out of her life.
After she disgraces her lover with an expose she buggers off back to the USA.
Here she starts working on a biographical story on a famous female musician/composer/teacher.
She moves into the school over the summer to get some background information, but before she even manages to meet this woman the composer disappears.
I don't know just didn't grab me. I loved the Halo Effect from this writer, but could feel no empathy for out heroine.
Justine was totally devastated by her Mother's death and it felt like every other page we were being told about her idyllic life with her mother and how now, as a grown up she was not functioning without her. And we were told again and again (I get it). OK so, her Dad should have left her Mum at home so Justine could say farewell instead of zipping her off to the funeral home.
Maybe the book should have had a bit more editing to tighten it up. There are some nice sex scenes but I don't actually think I'd call this erotic.
October 15, 2013
This is the third of Rose's books I've read. I really enjoyed her debut novel ("Lip Service"), because it had an unexpected plot line and managed to be the most erotic book about a mystery I think I've ever read. However, as her books have continued, she has seemed to gravitate towards pumping up the mystery/ detective, and dialing back on the heavy breathing. Most likely, this is a great business decision for her-- detective and mystery fiction have a huge audience, and her books are going to appeal to people who like their suspense with a little sweat. I think the only readers who are going to be bothered are people who are like me, for whom mystery stories are just a real hard sell.
M.J. Rose's books are nearly visceral to read (this lady describes a buttered roll and I can practically taste it), so if you enjoy suspense/ mystery and you think you'd enjoy it with enough steaminess to make you glance around and make sure no one can see your jaw drop, pick her up.
M.J. Rose's books are nearly visceral to read (this lady describes a buttered roll and I can practically taste it), so if you enjoy suspense/ mystery and you think you'd enjoy it with enough steaminess to make you glance around and make sure no one can see your jaw drop, pick her up.
August 26, 2014
Never have I read a book that was both so sensuous and sensual. The tastes, the smells, the sights, the sounds, the textures. Wow!
Through Justine the author explores both a mysterious disappearance and the mystery of grief. As in Du Maurier's Rebecca, or the works of Martha Grimes, the search is for truth buried in the past. The plot is compelling; a tight work of suspense that makes for good reading on its own. However, unlike Nancy Drew and her adult successors, Justine is capable of reflecting upon her own life, and acknowledging how grief for her mother has affected and colored her life.
In short, all the fun of traditional mysteries, but full of delicious passages your brain will want to savor.
Through Justine the author explores both a mysterious disappearance and the mystery of grief. As in Du Maurier's Rebecca, or the works of Martha Grimes, the search is for truth buried in the past. The plot is compelling; a tight work of suspense that makes for good reading on its own. However, unlike Nancy Drew and her adult successors, Justine is capable of reflecting upon her own life, and acknowledging how grief for her mother has affected and colored her life.
In short, all the fun of traditional mysteries, but full of delicious passages your brain will want to savor.
February 10, 2010
Would have better if it wasn't so over written. I hate novels that need major editing. Have no time for over written books. Otherwise was not a bad story line. Pridictable plot, but not a bad way to spend the day
September 15, 2016
Best one yet
How .MD
Rose keeps producing these mind messing reads is amazi g
I did not like the character of Justin
E for much of the. Book but came to love and understand her when the sheets were all played
How .MD
Rose keeps producing these mind messing reads is amazi g
I did not like the character of Justin
E for much of the. Book but came to love and understand her when the sheets were all played
September 11, 2009
Bought this several years ago but finally read it last week. Loved the story and the characters pulled me in from the get-go. And, I learned a bit about music and cooking besides!
March 22, 2014
Eloquent, Real, Engaging
This book captured me and held tight. I felt an emotional bond with the characters; felt it resonate with depictions of grief, family, and behaviors.
This book captured me and held tight. I felt an emotional bond with the characters; felt it resonate with depictions of grief, family, and behaviors.
January 17, 2015
Interesting story, kept me reading. I wanted it to be a more indepth experation of the ideas.
September 14, 2016
Another awesome and surprising book by MJ Rose. I will say it again, I love it when an author surprises me and takes the story where I never imagined.
May 19, 2014
Captivating!
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews