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Автор М. Дж. Роуз

The Hypnotist

In Vienna a clandestine robbery inside a locked library leads to a brutal murder. A 1,500-year-old sculpture holds the Metropolitan Museum of Art hostage. A young woman’s fatal accident gives two lovers a chance to meet again, against all odds. A centuries-old massacre in Persia has modern-day repercussions in Iran. In New York City a Matisse masterpiece surfaces after twenty years, mutilated and vandalized.

A modern-day reincarnationist is hell-bent on finding tools to aid in past life regressions no matter what the cost—in dollars or lives. Everything rests on the shoulders of Lucian Glass, special agent with the FBI’s Art Crime Team, who himself is suffering from the aftermath of a brutal attack, impossible nightmares and his own crisis of faith.

If reincarnation is real, how can he live with who he was in his past life? If it’s not, then how can he live with who he has become in the present?

THE HYPNOTIST

A Novel by

M. J. Rose

Book 3 in the

Reincarnationist Series

by Melisse Shapiro

Dedication:

To Mad Max Perkins,

for your faith

To my readers:

Please visit Reincarnationist. org to subscribe to my free newsletter and get exclusive access to special materials, lost chapters, screen savers and more.

Epigraph

“Often, in the cosseted quarters of a museum, we forget that every work of ancient art is a survivor, a representative of untold numbers of similar artworks that perished.

This triumphant exhibition makes us remember, while demonstrating that every survivor saves much more than just itself: long strands of culture, identity and history waiting to be woven back together. ”

—Roberta Smith, writing in the New York Times about the exhibit Silent Survivors of Afghanistan’s 4,000 Tumultuous Years

Chapter

ONE

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. ”

—Edgar Allan Poe

Twenty Years Ago

Time played tricks on him whenever he stood in front of the easel. Hypnotized by the rhythm of the brush on the canvas, by one color merging into another, the two shades creating a third, the third melting into a fourth, he was lulled into a state of single-minded consciousness focused only on the image emerging. Immersed in the act of painting, he forgot obligations, missed classes, didn’t remember to eat or to drink or look at the clock. This was why, at 5:25 that Friday evening, Lucian Glass was rushing down the urine-stinking steps to the gloomy subway platform when he should have already been uptown where Solange Jacobs was waiting for him at her father’s framing gallery. Together, they planned to walk over to an exhibit a block away, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When he reached the store, the shade was drawn and the Closed sign faced out, but the front door wasn’t locked. Inside, none of the lamps were lit, but there was enough ambient twilight coming through the windows for him to see that Solange wasn’t there, only dozens and dozens of empty frames, encasing nothing but pale yellow walls, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting to be filled like lost souls looking for mates.