Last month, my Libby hold came in for The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb. I was curious but skeptical about the book I had seen plastered all over Bookstagram. Lo and behold, unlike several other times, I did not get burned by giving in to book FOMO (fear of missing out) for a possibly overhyped book. I absolutely loved The Violin Conspiracy. I finished it in less than a week.

Ray McMillan, a young black boy who grows up listening to his grandmother share stories about her enslaved Pop Pop playing fiddle for his slave masters is inspired to learn to play the violin and become a concert violinist. He faces racism and microaggressions along the way.

To everyone’s surprise, the rare violin is valued at tens of millions of dollars which unearths the alleged descendants of the slave master trying to lay claim to the instrument, as well as Ray’s own family members suing for ownership so they can sell it and pocket the profits. Things get even worse when the violin is stolen for ransom and the hunt for the violin begins. More about the novel and my thoughts about it can be found in my post Symphonies and Conspiracies.

The storytelling of family history, symphonies and orchestras, and stolen instrument was so enrapturing that I checked to see if Slocumb had written other books. He did! I immediately borrowed Symphony of Secrets. At the time of naming my blog post for The Violin Conspiracy, I had no idea of the second novel’s title.

Though Symphony of Secrets is not a sequel, it’s another musically-based mystery by Slocumb. Like its predecessor, a decades-old mystery must be solved in the present 2000s. The story’s narration jumps back and forth between the decades until they and their characters merge. The common denominator is Frederick Delaney.

In 1920s Harlem, Frederick Delaney is a slightly better than mediocre white musician who’s put together a group to play gigs around the city. Though it’s his group, the other members, Black musicians, point out that he needs to work on his musicianship.

In steps Josephine Reed, who happens to be around when they rehearse. By the descriptions of her actions, speech, and ways of thinking, it’s clear that she is neurodivergent in today’s terms, though her different-ness is never fully discussed in the novel. Other people simply thinks she’s strange, but she’s self-sufficient and a musical ingenue.

Jospehine plays music by ear, but she also sees music in colors and shapes. She refers to them as such. After she critiques Delaney’s skills just to correct him, he hires her to tutor him. He finds out she’s homeless and offers to let her crash in his one-bedroom apartment. The two must be discreet. It is America in the early 1900s after all. Delaney even takes it a step further by getting her hired as an assistant at the same office that employs him to play piano at different store locations.

Living together, they fall into a routine. She brings new life to the apartment via her cooking and cleaning and love of music. Their relationship never strays into the area of romance, as I feared it would. They do develop an unhealthy co-dependency on each other. Josephine needs steady routine in her life, while Delaney needs her musical genius, which he passes off as his own for years.

Decades after Frederick Delaney’s death, his estate places a life-changing call to Bern Hendricks. To say that Bern is a Delaney scholar would be an understatement. Not only has he studied the man’s music, but he is an expert on the man himself, to the point where he knows his handwriting. The estate is banking on his unparalleled knowledge about their late relative to help decipher and authenticate his last incomplete musical score called RED, which was discovered in an old building once owned by Delaney.

While reviewing the sheets, Bern discovers discrepancies in style and handwriting. Thanks to his tech-savvy friend Eboni Josephine Reed is identified by facial recognition on old, grainy newspaper photographs. Had they not scoured through notes and newspaper archives, Josephine’s story would remain unknown to the world and even to her own family.  Their unwavering determination to uncover the truth about the true authorship of the Red Symphony even to the detriment of their own personal safety and possible career derailment is what adds a lot of tension to the novel.

A white man stealing and taking credit for a Black woman’s work is just the beginning of plot twist of Symphony of Secrets. The truth about Frederick Delaney is far more sinister and will leave readers shocked.

Read my other reviews