Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Still, it’s a gripping novel, and Slocumb, himself a violinist, does an excellent job explaining the world of classical music to those who might be unfamiliar with it.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. That’s all they saw and that’s all he was.” While the whodunit element of Slocumb’s novel is unlikely to stump mystery fans, his writing is strong, if a little unpolished in parts. Ray, who is Black, has to deal with not only lawsuits from his family and the Marks family, but also with vicious racism from both inside and outside the music world: “No matter how nice the suit, no matter how educated his speech or how strong the handshake, no matter how much muscle he packed on, no matter how friendly or how smart he was, none of it mattered at all. Slocumb’s novel is told in flashbacks, chronicling Ray’s early years and fraught relationship with his uncaring mother and his ascent as a star violinist who takes America by storm. Ray trusts only a few people, including his violist girlfriend, Nicole, and his “mentor, friend, and surrogate mother,” Janice. He has a few suspects in mind, chief among them the members of two families: the Marks clan, who claim that Ray’s great-great-grandfather, an enslaved person, took the violin from their ancestor and his own family, a collection of grasping doubters who don’t care much for Ray but do care about his valuable violin. Ray, a classical music phenom who’s about to compete in the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, discovers his violin has gone missing in his Charlotte, North Carolina, house when he opens its case, he finds only a tennis shoe and a ransom note demanding $5 million in Bitcoin. And it happens to be worth more than $10 million. For Ray McMillian, the protagonist of Slocumb’s debut, the theft of his violin is especially painful-not only was it a gift from his beloved grandmother, it’s also a Stradivarius, one of the rarest instruments in the world. There are few worse nightmares for a musician than having a treasured instrument stolen.
A classical musician tries to find his stolen violin in this entertaining debut novel.
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