From the publisher:
Who would want to kill Tomaso Rainaldi, an elderly, unassuming violin-maker in the quiet Italian city of Cremona? All he really possessed was an obsessive love of violins.

And an encyclopaedic knowledge of them. Supposing he knew more then anyone else - not just about the famous violins, but about missing violins? Ones of the calibre of the fabled Messiah, Stradivari's most subline creation, the Mona Lisa of the music world. A violin now in the Ashmolean in Oxford - and worth £10 million...

The investegation into Rainaldi's affairs reveals an appointment he had in Venice with the eccentric and exceedingly rich collector Enrico Forlani, and a trail that winds back to a mysterious past, and another murder, an enigmatic Englishman and an unscrupulous violin-dealer. A train of events that careers across Italy and England in a game where musical instruments change hands for millions, where forgery is an art form and the preferred method of negotiation is murder...