Furthermore, it’s a pitch-perfect accompaniment for the virtuoso “soloist” performance of the narrative: a searing dissection of obsession, familial strife, greed, and race relations through the plot device lens of a stolen Stradivarius. While I’m still not sure calling this a “thriller” is quite the right fit (despite the way it was marketed, I think “literary mystery” is much more apt) it was abundantly clear: choosing such an unsparing, utterly cutthroat industry for the novel’s setting was a seamless backdrop for a psychologically driven work-both thematically and tonally.

* Peter shudders as he thinks about the time he waited five hours in a Southern Californian branch of the DMV.*Īnyhow-the more I read The Violin Conspiracy? The more I realized just how ill-informed (OK, I’ll say it: dumb) my initial gut reaction was. So, I had to check it out because …įYI, reader: DMV is a colloquial slang term that refers to “DC/Maryland/Virginia.” I am NOT representing the Department of Motor Vehicles, because … well, that’s just gross. Plus, Slocumb is based in the Northern Virginia/DC metropolitan area, my native neck of the woods.

But, when you think about glissandos, andantes, and vibratos, does your mind immediately modulate to a pedal-to-the-metal, plot-driven storytelling genre like a thriller? And, more importantly-would it be able to sustain itself for 300+ pages? I was … skeptical.Īll that said, I was very curious to see if the story-written by Brendan Slocumb, a highly successful concert violinist himself-was up to the task. Is it a highly unusual, unique backdrop to set a story in? Absolutely. But I was struggling to wrap my head around how that would translate well to the specific structural demands of a thriller novel. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the idea of a novel placed in the oeuvre of professional orchestral music-I come from a family of musicians and played three different types of saxophones (soprano being my favorite, obviously) for the better part of a decade. To be completely fair, this was the first thought that entered my head when The Violin Conspiracy was recommended to me. How could the world of classical music possibly be conducive to a thriller?

The violin conspiracy book