Symphony of Secrets

"This haunting and heartaching second novel is a rarity – a suspenseful dual-timeline thriller about icons and hidden figures in music. Like the star of Brendan Slocumb’s debut, The Violin Conspiracy, Josephine Reed defies expectations. In the early 20th century, her options are severely limited; she’s a young Black woman and, though it wouldn’t have been called this then, neurodivergent. She’s also enormously talented, and her art is everything. She followed her passion to New York, writing music in secret, doing odd jobs, and sharing an apartment with a new friend, the ambitious but struggling composer Frederic Delaney. While Fred gets famous, Josephine fades away like so many new arrivals. Decades later, musicology professor Bern Hendricks receives an enticing call from an institution inviting him to restore Fred’s long-lost handwritten opera score for performance. What the young music professor and his high-tech partner Eboni discover could shake the foundation to the ground."