The Ragtime Traveler

To think of the film The Sting is to hear Scott Joplin s ragtime music. In the final Ragtime Mystery, a story that flashes back and forth in time, the focus is on a battered black duffel stuffed with unknown music by Joplin that has suddenly surfaced. Alan Chandler, today's top ragtime performer and expert on all things Joplin, calls this the most important find in the history of popular American music, and immediately flies to Sedalia, Missouri, with his grandson Tom to evaluate the discovery. Before Chandler can collect the bag, a murder involving alcohol, torture, and piano string interferes. The duffel is gone. He contends with his own experiences Time warp? Hallucinations induced by his cancer-fighting drugs? as well as accelerating and deadly quests for the duffel."

It takes one moment in 2016 for ragtime music expert Alan Chandler to go from sitting in his hotel room in Sedalia, Missouri, to standing beside the King of Ragtime-Scott Joplin-at his upright piano in 1899. Chandler suddenly finds himself more than one hundred years earlier inside the famous Maple Leaf Club with its gas chandeliers, massive walnut bar, gaming tables, and pals surrounding the noted pianist and composer. "What in the hell is going on? Am I dreaming?" Clearly something unexpected is going on for Chandler in the fourth and final Ragtime Mystery by father and son Larry Karp and Casey Karp. A longtime friend Mickey Potash phones Chandler, top ragtime performer and national expert on Joplin, to say that a duffel filled with Joplin's handwritten music has surfaced. Chandler and his grandson, Tom, race from Seattle to Sedalia to evaluate what may be the most important find in popular American music. Potash shows them initial pages which look authentic, but before they can get the duffel hidden in a padlocked closet, he is tortured and murdered. The duffel is stolen. Disappointment encourages a resurgence of symptoms in Chandler's Stage 4 cancer. He's determined to validate the music before time runs out. Tom, and later his wife, Miriam, help him. Another murder complicates their investigation. The trail to the duffel is crowded: Jackson and Saramae, two young people with journalism in their blood, want to solve the crime, as do homicide detectives and antique shopkeepers. Not surprisingly, the roots of the lost music lie in past emotional conflict, now tangled in genealogical warfare.