Lady Blues: forget-me-not, ninth book in the LeGarde Mystery series: available rights

What do an abused Korean seamstress and a sultry WWII blues singer with a voice like velvet have in common? Deep, intense love –found, then lost– in a flash of unfair circumstances.

Meet Lida Kim, forty-two year old prisoner in a current day tailor shop in Upstate NY. Isolated from American society by an iron-fisted older brother, Lida knows no English and is virtually chained to her sewing machine.

When music professor Gus LeGarde and Siegfried, his German brother-in-law, notice smoke pouring from the top floor of the establishment, they race to the rescue. Thom Kim, badly burned and unconscious, is whisked to the hospital burn unit, leaving Lida unprotected and homeless. Siegfried, a gentle giant mildly brain damaged in a childhood accident, falls hard for Lida, the first potential love of his life. Introduced to an unfamiliar world of television and independent women, Lida begins to unfold, but her new feelings of worthiness are fleeting.

Now, meet Bella DuBois, blues crooner of Harlem Jazz clubs, ingénue singer shot to fame in WWII. Bella falls for a young jazz pianist just before he signs up for the war. Problem is, the biracial couple must quench their passion in private, to avoid the outrageous bigotry of the era. On a foggy night in 1946, the lovers are torn apart when her pianist disappears overseas.

While dealing with Lida and Siegfried’s troubled affair at home, Gus is drafted to visit a local memory center. There, he meets Kip Sterling, a patient with a mysterious past. Gus connects with the octogenarian through music. Shuffled through the system for sixty-five years, Kip speaks in complex musical terms and conducts symphonies of birds through his window, while incessantly asking for “his Bella.” When a new Alzheimer’s drug, Memorphyl, starts to work, Gus digs into Kip’s past to peel back the layers, revealing a possible connection to a mystery linked to the strange and unsolved disappearance of Glenn Miller and his plane on December 14th, 1946.

Gus becomes obsessed with Kip’s history and feverishly searches for clues leading to the man’s mysterious Bella. Instead, he discovers Clarence DuBois, Kip’s illegitimate son. Clarence shares a startling revelation: Bella, a sultry blues singer from the 1940s, is still alive. Now the biracial lovers, separated 65 years ago in a set of unfair circumstances, will be reunited. Before this eventuates, the drug company Novacom discovers Memorphyl works too well, cutting into the profits of the circle of nursing homes they secretly own, and a “new” formula sends recovering patients—including Kip—back to the gloom of Alzheimer’s disease.

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