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.
There are two storylines running through Moon Over Soho: one that begins and ends with this book, involving a string of suspicious deaths, all of them jazz musicians. The other centres on a mysterious, faceless, unknown sorcerer running around London killing and conducting his own Dr. Moreau type experiments, and the reader is left hanging as to its resolution, presumably because it will come back up in future books.
I knew how the first story line would play out by the time I got to a page that falls somewhere in the range of 40-60 (I won't give the exact page number because I don't want to risk spoilers). This is why my rating is only 3.5 stars. The story is still good, but it's definitely hampered by knowing the ending, and wanting to smack Peter for not figuring out what was right in front of him a lot sooner. To give credit though, I did not foresee how he would try to resolve the situation; I liked it, even though it didn't work out quite the way he's hoped.
Reading updates
-
Started reading
-
2 October, 2017:
Finished reading
-
2 October, 2017:
Reviewed