Beethoven's Tenth by Brian Harvey

While a jazz pianist discovers a priceless item, he enters the world of hoods, killers, and deception. This is the first Frank Ryan mystery from Nanaimo writer Brian Harvey.

Frank is more than a piano tuner; he is a technician who makes your instrument sing. When he discovers the fault in Miss P.'s piano, she pays him in 'art', handing him a stack of papers. He discovers the browned handwritten pages to be Beethoven's Tenth Symphony, dated 1825.

"If I really had my hands on Beethoven's Tenth Symphony, I was still missing the punchline. And that worried me."

The existence of this lost work would be the Super Bowl of music. That he holds just three-quarters of it means someone else has the last piece and would be desperate to acquire the rest.

Frank is in his element playing classics in a basement jazz club called The Loft, owned by his Japanese friend and saxophonist Kaz Nakamura. When Miss P. winds up dead, her house ransacked, police attention is turned to Frank. He confides in Kaz, but is captured before he can investigate and hauled to a nearby island for a grim end. Frank is extremely resourceful, or just lucky, to escape and head to Vancouver for a big Beethoven conference, where perhaps the manuscript could be revealed or sold for millions.

This little noir gem had it all, wrapped in a tight package. The pace is fast, the surprises genuine—with a finale twist I did not see coming. In retrospect, this had a perfect structure I couldn't see, while I was trapped in the dark with Frank, in an abandoned shed, awaiting certain death. Harvey fits a lot of background and story into this mystery, even some Nazis, and I was ready to go right into his follow-up Frank Ryan mystery, Tokyo Girl, which was even better. For lovers of jazz, noir, mystery, crime, and intrigue, Beethoven's Tenth delivers.

Recommended.

2105 / Tradeback / 160 pages

My other Brian Harvey review:

Tokyo Girl (Frank Ryan #2)