Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb (Anchor, 2023).

Brendan Slocumb has done it again: created a breathtaking thriller about music.

In some ways, I liked Symphony of Secrets even better than Slocumb’s first novel, The Violin Conspiracy, which I reviewed here last fall. This time, he indulges in a little musical fantasizing. He sets his story in a world just like ours—except that his world contains an early 20th-century American composer so brilliant, and so philanthropic, that his influence is still widely felt in modern America. Imagine if, say, the Gershwin name were still so powerful, nearly a century after George’s death, that one of his descendants “probably had the president of the United States in her ‘favorite contacts’ list.”

A fantasy, for sure. But it’s a fun one, and—more to the point—it raises the stakes for our protagonist, Dr. Bern Hendricks, a music scholar who idolizes composer Frederic Delaney. Not only has he always been crazy about Delaney’s music, but the Delaney Foundation gave him his ticket out of poverty when he was a gifted young French horn player, and he eventually grew up to do important work on the manuscripts of Delaney’s opera cycle.

As the book opens, Bern is being called back to the Foundation to work on an even bigger project: a long-sought, newly discovered Delaney opera. Bern is ecstatic over the discovery—until it takes him to a completely unexpected place. His research on the musical score, and on the working notes that go with it, turns up a mysterious set of initials and an old photograph of an unknown woman in Delaney’s entourage.

Before he knows it, Bern and his friend Eboni, a computer analyst and security expert, are hot on the trail of Josephine Reed, a homeless Black woman with a shattering secret.

It’s not hard to see where this is going (and anyway, things are pretty clearly spelled out on the book jacket). Slocumb follows the tried-and-true formula of a scholar, in dogged pursuit of a dangerous truth, forced to flee the wealthy and powerful who want nothing more than to keep that truth buried. And he adds a dual timeline, also pretty standard these days, into the mix.

What keeps this story compelling, across both timelines, is Josephine. We first meet her as a disheveled figure in a Jazz Age nightclub, just sitting quietly and listening to the band in which a young Freddy Delaney is playing. But as unobtrusive as she seems, she grabs the reader and holds on. Her mind turns out to be a whole world of its own, where sounds are caught and transformed into colors and patterns and ultimately into wonderful music.

Delaney is one of the first to recognize both her astonishing gift and her vulnerable position in an uncaring world. He eagerly reaches out to help her, but he soon finds there’s a fine line between helping and taking possession. To watch Josephine blossoming and Freddy slowly corrupting himself at the same time is dismaying but riveting—the author makes these characters so real that I couldn’t stop thinking about them and fearing for them, even when I had to put the book down. And through it all, he describes their music so vividly that (as with Paul Griffiths’ Mr. Beethoven a couple years ago) I kept wishing I could hear it.

“Musical thriller” may be a niche genre, but Brendan Slocumb is doing great things with it. I already can’t wait for his next one.

(Cover image copyright Anchor Books.)

Book Links:

Symphony of Secrets on Amazon
Symphony of Secrets on Bookshop

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I contributed to this Christ and Pop Culture tribute to the late Tim Keller.

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