The Forgotten Painting
“Powerful and gripping story. The Forgotten Painting is without a doubt the best novella I have ever read. This powerful and gripping story had me totally engaged from cover to cover.“
~ BookBub Review
At present, this title is exclusively available from Amazon.
REVIEWS
“This book is extremely well written and plotted. The fascinating provenance of the painting is very well illustrated. It is absolutely entrancing.”
“This is a terrific short story, full of atmosphere and page-turning mystery. For such a short story, the plot has more twists and turns than one normally finds in a much longer mystery novel.”
“Very seldom does a story capture my emotions as deeply as this one did.”
"This is truly a page~turner, one of the best fiction I have read from new authors this side of the 21st century."
“Farago's skill at characterisation is second to none.”
“This novel has strong, well developed characters and an interesting story line that keeps you turning the pages..”
“Gripping Tale of Mystery and Death!.”
“The most riveting and gripping novella I have ever read! A stand-alone novella that also intrigues the reader from cover-to-cover, chapter-to-chapter, page-to-page.”
“Gabriel Farago once again hits a home run with this historical thriller. Farago’s writing style is smooth and detailed making him an excellent story teller. Farago is like an artist building his story carefully and prepping his readers with the same intensity that an artist prepares his canvas and applies ink to the brush making his art visible and captivating!”
Buy Your Copy of The Forgotten Painting Now!
AWARDS
Amazon Bestselling and Multi-Award-Winning Book
Readers' Favorite Gold
Award
Fiction Short Story/Novella Category
#1 International Amazon Bestseller
Independent Author Network
Outstanding Novella Category Winner
THE BOOK
The Forgotten Painting (A Jack Rogan Mysteries Novella)
A desperate letter. A dark family secret. A hidden past.
When a rabbi in Prague throws celebrated author and Australian journalist Jack Rogan a challenge, he is irresistibly drawn into a baffling mystery and begins to investigate.
Joining forces with Tristan, a remarkable young man with psychic powers, Rogan embarks on a journey of discovery that takes him into hidden corners of a violent past where unspeakable atrocities cost the lives of thousands.
Following hidden clues that point to a dark family secret reaching to the very top of the Catholic Church, Jack follows the trail of a lost letter dispatched from a Nazi concentration camp to tell the world what had happened.
Can Jack solve the mystery and deliver a long-lost letter before the voices crying from mass graves are silenced forever, or will humanity be deprived of a warning it cannot afford to ignore?
CHAPTER EXCERPT
Warsaw Ghetto: 15 May 1943
The major looked at the devastation around him, and smiled. It was over. The uprising that had begun on 19 April 1943 had been crushed. His superiors would be pleased. Streets littered with corpses, smouldering ruins and the stench of death was all that remained of the once crowded ghetto. A gentle rain had made the pools of congealed blood on the pavements slippery. Grey skies wept, lamenting the senseless brutality and slaughter. The major’s men, all SS, were methodically searching every building for the few remaining survivors who had gone into hiding. Everyone else was either dead, or had already been deported to concentration camps.
‘Herr Sturmbannfuehrer, in here!’ shouted one of the major’s men, waving from the other side of the street. ‘We found some.’ The major crossed the road and followed the man into the building. ‘They were hiding under the floorboards,’ continued the officer, ‘a whole family. Quite ingenious.’
The major looked at the bearded man sitting next to a frightfully thin woman and three children—two boys and a girl—cowering on the floor in front of him. The man was clutching a violin case to his chest. ‘Your name’, demanded the major.
Readers' Favorite Review of The Forgotten Painting
Joy, sorrow, suffering, tragedy, loss – the entire spectrum of human emotions can envelop a person for either good or evil. Nothing expresses the magnitude and infinitesimally emotional power of music and art than the story surrounding the lives that both created them and those that nurtured and enjoyed them. Music and art are the very essence of being human. So, the story that follows music and art creates a powerful life force of its own. A story wrought with the joy of giving, the agony of having the gift removed, the guilt that follows the one who took the gift, and the violence that both frightened and expunged the beauty of life itself, making the beauty of the painting and the music dull in comparison.
We’re talking about a painting of a garden with a violinist playing off in the corner. The painting is by a famous Impressionist artist, Claude Monet. He painted the violinist into his garden scene and then gifted the painting to the violinist. A treasured gift that held prominence in the Jewish home for years captured the eye of a Nazi soldier after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The violinist and his family were sent to Auschwitz, the painting was hidden in the Imperial crypt of the Hapsburgs in Vienna, and the Nazi thief lived the remainder of his days in fear of being brought to trial for his war crimes and with regret for what he had done. But there’s another twist to this story, a mystery about the painting itself. Is it the real Monet? Or is it a forgery?
Very seldom does a story capture my emotions as deeply as this one did. Like the 1998 movie, The Red Violin, Gabriel Farago’s The Forgotten Painting: A Historical Mystery Novella takes the reader on a journey led by a painting and the music it represented. This is a story about a painting, but it is so much more. It’s a narrative, complex and intricate in its presentation, that traces a drama from the early 1920s, through the horrors of the Second World War and projecting a connection to a monastery in the outback of Australia and a young boy, Jack Rogan, a celebrated writer, a passionate storyteller, who will follow the clues that lead back to the hidden painting. Powerful writing. A mystery within a mystery.
Reviewed by Emily-Jane Hills Orford for Readers’ Favorite