A number of readers have asked me about the haunting score that accompanies the new Theatrical Trailer for The Phantom of Forest Lawn.

Well, it's part of the 'Introitus: Requiem Aeternam' movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's great Requiem in D Minor, K.626, the master's final work. It's a magnificent piece of music, and the thought that Mozart wrote a Requiem Mass for the Dead while on his own deathbed makes it especially moving.

The young maestro died, aged 35, in tremendous pain—probably from some kind of kidney or urinary blockage—around the 'Lachrymosa' movement, and his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr is believed to have completed the rest.

Like so many things in life, Mozart's 'Requiem' is something of ethereal beauty that emerged from untold suffering. And that is one of the themes of my forthcoming novel, The Phantom of Forest Lawn.

This is my fifth book, which seems like a lot (to me), except when I consider that Mozart—in only three-and-a-half decades on the planet—wrote some 800 symphonies, concertos, chorals, and most every other kind of music then extant.

One can only feel humble and grateful that such lives as his happened at all.

The Phantom of Forest Lawn is available everywhere now for pre-order, publishing on October 8. You'll be rewarded if you read it.