The Guarneri, a violin rarer than a Stradivarius, belonged to the charismatic Irish virtuoso Robert Flynn. Famed for his performances of the classical repertoire, including the early works of Ernest Grayson, Flynn wandered the countryside anonymously, playing in villages and collecting folk tunes before he died young during World War I.

Ernest Grayson, arguably the greatest British composer of the twentieth century, suffered a crisis of imagination in 1908 and spent time in a sanatorium in Zurich, where he was treated with the latest European therapies and returned to composing, creating his master works during the 1930s before committing suicide amid the chaos of World War II.

In the early 1990s, the teenaged American prodigy Allegra Balsen is about to perform Ernest Grayson’s first violin concerto on the Flynn Guarneri at Lincoln Center, when her best friend, a young cellist, is murdered backstage. Allegra goes on defiantly, to commemorate her friend and to honor the retiring concert mistress, violinist Moira Flynn.

Two Princeton musicologists attend the performance. They are studying Grayson’s work. As they delve into his musical scores, letters, photographs and other papers, they begin to untangle complicated love and family relations among Flynn, Grayson and descendants, coming closer and closer to the murderer, who is still at large and seeking another victim.

A brainy and haunting romance of the twentieth century—musical genius, madness, and love seen through the acute, empathetic eyes of academic detective Dr. Lucy Wunder as she, too, is pulled into the web.