Book 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.
If Harry Potter grew up and joined the Fuzz.' Ben Aaronovitch was born
and raised in London and all his work has reflected his abiding
fascination and love for what he modestly likes to refer to as the
'Capital of the World'. He works as a bookseller when he is not writing
tie-in novels and TV scripts.
