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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14432,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","book_status":[647],"book_genre":[662],"class_list":["post-14431","book","type-book","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","book_status-read","book_genre-detective-and-mystery-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book\/14431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/book"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"book_status","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book_status?post=14431"},{"taxonomy":"book_genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book_genre?post=14431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}