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Official Description:
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.
Read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Moon Over Soho is a nigh-on perfect audiobook for any lover of urban fantasy or crime, or jazz for that matter. It oozes cool, from the sweet and simple intro melody at each chapter interval, to the trendy west-end setting and to the deep, strong voice of the narrator, laced with humour.
Moon Over Soho is a combination of classic crime novel structure coupled with the urban fantasy setting, but these two alone are not enough, as many a dull urban fantasy novel will attest. It is the addition of humour, the likeable and (more importantly) believable characters, and the history – whether that be that of London itself, the characters or even the history of jazz – that make for a stand-out novel. The result of this combination is one of the best books of 2011.
The second book in the series surpasses its predecessor in almost every way, from character development to pace, and begins to develop some sinister story arcs that are sure to please any lover of a good series, including the possibility of a network of dangerous and “ethically-challenged” magicians...
Whether you read it or listen, it is a brilliant book and the next one in the series, Whispers Under Ground, cannot come soon enough.
Highly Recommended.
JA
Order your copy of Moon Over Soho from Amazon UK
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