The Score of Ashes: A Berlin Mystery Music, Silence, and Murder

On a stormy July night in 1932, the renowned conductor Konrad Weiss raises his baton for the final movement of his own piece and never lowers it again. He collapses before an audience of Berlin's most distinguished citizens, in a hall sealed off by flooding, a dead telephone line, and a police cordon surrounding the Tiergarten after a night of street unrest. No one could enter, and apparently, no one could leave. Inspector Elias Voss refuses to accept convenient timelines. Trapped inside the Haus der Morgenröte with six suspects who cannot leave and a relentless storm outside, he begins piecing together the last hour of the conductor's life minute by minute, convinced that between Weiss's final downbeat and his last breath, someone has carefully manipulated the truth like a musical score. Why does the backstage clock run four minutes slow? Why is the water glass on Weiss's desk untouched when the bottle beside it is poisoned? And what is concealed within the four silent bars the conductor penciled into his own manuscript the night he died? Following a trail of encrypted scores, coded train timetables, and a locked archive no one admits to opening, Voss uncovers a conductor who was more than just a conductor, and a respected institution hiding far more than music behind its doors. Presented with the measured logic and fair-play style of a lost Golden Age classic, The Score of Ashes provides readers with every clue Voss discovers, in the order he finds them. Settle into a chilly concert hall on the final night of a fading republic, and see if you can discern the truth in the silence before the metronome ticks.