Braided Shame

In Braided Shame a suave college fundraiser scores the really big gift only to have his heiress donor turn up dead, and he himself becomes the chief suspect. This cozy whodunit featuring a triangle among gay men is set on a small Southern campus filled with secrets. Braided Shame is about art and life, lies and truth, loneliness and family, treachery and revenge, forgiveness and redemption. The author, Louis Briel, is a nationally known portrait painter. In Braided Shame he paints with words on the page instead of pigment on canvas, bringing to the novel a wealth of experience from his career as a college fundraiser in the 1970's and his long association with art and artists. For the latest information, reviews and signings, please go to http: //braidedshame.blogspot.com.

A Native Virginian, Louis Briel was schooled in the Classics. He earned degrees from Hampden-Sydney College as first-honor graduate and Harvard University as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. An internationally acclaimed portrait painter, his art training includes a certificate from the American Academy in Rome and study in Boston with Ann Tabachnick and Morton Sacks. The Smithsonian Institution in 1993 acquired Briel’s painting of tennis great Arthur Ashe for the National Portrait Gallery. In 1995 the U. S. House of Representatives added his portrait of Congressman Thomas J. Bliley to its collection. Briel’s haunting likeness of Princess Diana accompanied Elton John on his 1997-98 world tour and is now part of the singer’s personal collection. It is featured in Diana in Art, compiled by Mem Mehmet (Chaucer Press 2007). More recently, Briel has worked with Carol Burnett to create a posthumous portrait of her daughter Carrie Hamilton, which hangs in the Carrie Hamilton Theatre at the Pasadena Playhouse. Briel’s artwork can be seen on his website www.louisbriel.com Briel’s first novel, Braided Shame, a mystery, was published in 2008 and is available on Amazon.com