Flash Point

Flash Point is Paul Adam’s 2006 standalone musical-mystery, set largely in Moscow and Cremona, and a useful entry point into his under-translated catalog of Italy-and-the-classical-music-world mysteries. Joe Stryker, a Glasgow journalist on a culture-page assignment, is reporting on the Tchaikovsky Competition when a young Zimbabwean violinist is found dead in a Moscow hotel bathroom. The instrument she was playing, a Stradivarius on loan from a private collection, is gone. The competition organizers want this quiet. The dead violinist’s family wants the truth.

Adam writes the classical-music procedural better than almost any contemporary mystery writer. The Cremona luthier-shop sections (the actual physical inspection a master maker conducts on a suspected forgery, the small-shop politics of the workshops that descend from the Amati and Guarneri lineages) are the texture nobody else delivers. The Moscow chapters are well realized: the post-Soviet competition bureaucracy, the cash-and-favor logic of inviting foreign laureates, the gulf between the Conservatory hierarchy and the dorm-rat realities the competitors live with. The mystery is tightly constructed.

Recommended for fans of musical-world mystery (John Harvey’s Cold Light, Donna Leon’s Acqua Alta for the Italian register) and for readers looking for books like Flash Point in the Stradivarius-mystery subgenre. Four solid stars and a great introduction to Adam’s work.