In the book we meet veteran FBI agent Lucian Glass, who is currently with the FBI’s Art Crime Team and who is searching for Dr. Malachai Samuels, current director of The Phoenix Foundation, an organization more than a century old, whose studies focus on reincarnation. Samuels, immoral and dangerous, is thoroughly obsessed with discovering The Memory Tools, meditation tools reportedly used by ancients to explore past lives. When a crazed art collector holds a 1,500-year-old sculpture called Hypnos (which is supposedly linked to paranormal powers) hostage by stealing and then destroying a priceless Matisse painting and threatening to destroy four more great works, agent Glass is forced to face the devastating events in his past, and perhaps even his past lives. Glass, a logical and rational skeptic of all things paranormal, will go undercover, and under hypnosis, at The Phoenix Foundation to face his demons and to get his man.

The case ultimately takes agent Glass to New York, Paris and Hollywood, not to mention his travels under hypnosis to Greece and nineteenth-century Persia that will challenge his reality, his beliefs, and even his sanity. Throughout the book MJ Rose weaves in art, archeology and an interesting debate about art and ownership as the sculpture at the heart of this story is claimed by both Iran and Greece. 

The Hypnotist by MJ Rose is available online and at bookstores everywhere. You can learn more about MJ Rose at her official website or her popular blog Buzz, Balls & Hype. For you writers out there, Rose is also the founder of the first marketing company for authors called AuthorBuzz.com.  

I  recently had the opportunity to interview MJ Rose about her book and her life. Please take a few more minutes to read the revealing interview at Frank Mundo's LA Books Examiner site.