I was my dad's vinyl-wallah: I changed his records while he lounged around drinking tea, and that's how I know my Argo from my Tempo. And it's why, when Dr Walid called me to the morgue to listen to a corpse, I recognised the tune it was playing. Something violently supernatural had happened to the victim, strong enough to leave its imprint like a wax cylinder recording. Cyrus Wilkinson, part-time jazz saxophonist and full-time accountant, had apparently dropped dead of a heart attack just after finishing a gig in a Soho jazz club. He wasn't the first. No one was going to let me exhume corpses to see if they were playing my tune, so it was back to old-fashioned legwork, starting in Soho, the heart of the scene. I didn't trust the lovely Simone, Cyrus' ex-lover, professional jazz kitten and as inviting as a Rubens' portrait, but I needed her help: there were monsters stalking Soho, creatures feeding off that special gift that separates the great musician from someone who can raise a decent tune. What they take is beauty. What they leave behind is sickness, failure and broken lives.
And as I hunted them, my investigation got tangled up in another story: a brilliant trumpet player, Richard 'Lord' Grant - my father - who managed to destroy his own career, twice. That's the thing about policing: most of the time you're doing it to maintain public order. Occasionally you're doing it for justice. And maybe once in a career, you're doing it for revenge.
So Peter Grant has survived his introduction to the fine balancing act of being a member of the London Metropolitan Police Force and being a wizard. His friend Lesley is trying to cope with her destroyed face and having to move back to be with her parents and not knowing what she's going to able to do in the future.
It's mostly because of his father that he spots the link between some recent deaths. They appear normal but there's something else there, something strange, they're all Jazz players and finding what's killing them is almost going to kill him, and his boss.
I love this series. The characters are well rounded and come to life on the page, he holds the numinous close to the real and you can imagine it really happening. I could imagine this as a TV series and would probably be hooked from the first episode.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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1 July, 2012:
Finished reading
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1 July, 2012:
Reviewed