Brendan Slocumb

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A riveting tale about a Black classical musician whose family heirloom violin is stolen on the eve of the most prestigious classical music competition in the world.

Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can't afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the show more classical music world. And when he makes the startling discovery that his great-grandfather's fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, his star begins to rise.

Then with the International Tchaikovsky Competition—the Olympics of classical music—fast approaching, his prized family heirloom is stolen. Ray is determined to get it back. But now his family and the descendants of the man who once enslaved Ray's great-grandfather are each claiming that the violin belongs to them.

With the odds stacked against him and the pressure mounting, will Ray ever see his beloved violin again?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Want to know what people really think of you? Stand between them and a big, fat payday. You will get your actual, genuine position in their hierarchy delivered at express speed and before the varnish could be applied, still less dried.

Rayquan (usually "Ray") McMillian learns that there's nothing in this world like the benjamins to bring stuff into focus very early: He grows up without anything extra and the minimum was as cheap as it could reasonably be (often enough cheaper). As soon as it became possible, Ray was pressured to stop wasting time with his stupid fiddling and get a shelf-stockin' job to "help the family" (aka his selfish mother). Time to make horrible noises on his fiddle was more than merely grudged, it was a source of actual anger...seen as selfish, unproductive, the action of a loser. (All those fingers pointin' back from the accusatory poking one missed her notice, it seems.)

You knew there'd be a grandmother in here, right? One who Believes in Ray? You were right, there is.

And a more wonderful soul it's hard to conjure. I was all ready to Pearl-Rule this bad boy before Grandma Nora (she whose belief in Ray makes her "talk so sweet {about him} it could give you diabetes") came on stage, I was so pissed off at the Philistines and money-grubbers Ray has to call family! What malign genetic flub gave Grandma Nora a daughter like Ray's mom?! And there's no end to the nasty, of course, since this is a thriller/mystery. But that's the tour I signed up to take, and was ready for. A bracing dose of lovingkindness later, it was all gas no brakes and that finish line won't know what hit it.

Ray, as you'll have gathered, is a fine musician and to hell with his grasping, whiny mother complaining about the "racket" his practicing makes. He perseveres, Grandma Nora's staunchness in his corner, and actually begins to climb the ladder of classical violin's performance hierarchy. What he faces along the way is no surprise to anyone reasonably sentient, as his ethnicity is used by everyone around him. Only rarely to help him, I'm sure you'll be stunned to learn. His other shining light is his teacher, his one professional mentor, Dr, Janice Stevens. She makes school a haven, a place where someone really gets him and sees the music in his being.

Ray's early training in Keep Calm and Carry On within the loving bosom of his family pays off. That ability to focus is his superpower. It leads him to the *pinnacle* of a violin soloist's ambitions: the International Tchaikovsky Competition, a quadrennial classical-music Olympics that unquestionably makes a musician's career. Even competing there is a leg up...and for a Black man raised with nothing, it is damned near unprecedented for him to be there.

That? That's enough novel for most of us. But Author Slocumb said, "...now, what happens if the Black man happens to get a Stradivarius from his grandmother...?"

What happens is betrayal, heartbreak, and the kind of publicity you damn sure can't pay for. Broken hearts mend; wounds don't fester forever; a career launched into the stratosphere by a juicy scandal leads to a lifetime of opportunities. Ones Ray's absolutely up to taking full advantage of, coming away with a silver medal in spite of the horrors around his violin's rape from him. This one unique possession, it will surprise no one to learn, opens so many doors to him. It will not surprise anyone, either, that he walks boldly up to the doors expecting them to open...and they do.

Ray's search for the thief of his prized possession, his almost desperate desire not to believe where the search leads him, and his dogged perseverance through it all speak volumes for the value of adversity surmounted in creating character. I think Author Slocumb did exactly the right thing by enabling Ray to reach back, to offer a hand of fellowship from his place of privilege.

Ray made it a point to highlight music by Black and Latinx composers. After all those years fighting and proving wrong the preconceptions that people who looked like him couldn't play the music of dead white men, he dove into the phenomenal music written by those people who did indeed look like him.

It is the thing that defines my memory of Ray McMillian, fictional character: He worked his ass off, he focused on the problem at hand, and he stomped the daylights out of the inner voices installed early that demanded he think about unimportant stuff instead of powering himself, supercharging his gifts with well-honed talents.

In the end, what matters in a life? Looking back, what difference does any of what we do make?

"Music's the gift. Caring's the gift. There are a lot of ways apart from a concert hall to make a difference in someone's life."

That's Dr. Janice Stevens, if you're wondering, having a ghostly chat with post-disaster Ray. Thanks, Janice. Whatever your name, wherever you might be...whichever one of us you reached out for, gave a hand to...Thanks to the Janices the world over who do something easy for them and priceless to the recipient.

Care. show less

On the one hand- a wonderful dive into the language of classical music, and the experiences of a passionate violinist who rises to the heights of international musical success.

On the other hand, a sensitive and open glimpse into the lived experiences of a Black boy (and later, man) who encounters the effects of both current and systemic racism on his journey in the world.

Slocumb did a really nice job, composing a thrilling, fast-paced mystery out of those elements. This book is hard to put show more down - I'm excited for his next work! show less

Bern Hendricks is a music professor, one of the world's leading authorities on the (fictional) early 20th-century composer Frederic Delaney. Delaney was a composer of astonishing range, writing not only symphonies and operas, but popular songs and musicals; he died abruptly after the critical failure of his opera RED, which he had hoped would restore his reputation after several years in a creative slump.

Bern is asked by the Delaney Foundation to take on a top-secret project. They've show more discovered the long-lost original manuscript for RED -- the version that flopped was Delaney's reconstruction of the work after he lost the only copy of the manuscript -- and asked Bern to edit the manuscript for performance and publication.

Slocumb cuts back and forth between that story and the story of how RED was written and lost in the 1920s and 1930s. When we meet him, Freddy Delaney is an aspiring composer. He's not having much success, though, and is supporting himself by working as a mediocre pianist in a jazz band by ight, and a song plugger by day. (In the days before radio, music publishers hired song pluggers to play their latest songs at the piano in large department stores to drum up sales of sheet music. George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern all worked as song pluggers in their youth.)

Freddy's luck begins to change when he meets Josephine Reed, a Black woman who becomes his piano teacher. The two become close companions. It's not quite a romantic relationship, but in that era, even a friendship between a man and a woman of different races needs to be hidden.

For the first two-thirds of the novel, this is a terrific piece of entertainment. But as Slocumb reveals (and Bern begins to piece together) the full extent of the relationship between Freddy and Josephine, the novel becomes more melodramatic and violent in ways that don't always feel organic. Particularly in the present-day story, some of the violence feels more like the author wanting to make a political statement than like something that would actually happen in these circumstances.

(Please note: I am not trying to suggest that such events -- I'm trying to avoid spoiling things here -- never happen in the real world; they do, far too often. I'm only saying that I didn't find them credible in this specific context.)

Despite some of the final act problems, I would recommend the book. Slocumb's characters are distinctive and well-defined. Josephine is a particularly fine creation; we'd probably recognize her today as being on the autism spectrum. She also has a form of synesthesia in which she experiences music as both color and shape; she confuses Bern no end by saying things like "you need to put the blue on the speedway" or "he pulled those tabs too soon." And Bern's best friend/computer whiz Eboni brings some bite and sarcasm to her scenes, but is never reduced to just another Sassy Black Sidekick.

The story moves briskly along, and Slocumb does a fine job of building suspense, both in terms of "what's going to happen next?" and "oh, no, I can see the disaster coming around the bend" anticipation.

And if you're listening, Hollywood: This would make a great miniseries for streaming. William Jackson Harper as Bern, Janelle Monae as Eboni, Audra McDonald as Josephine -- someone get on that, please. show less

I don't remember why I decided to pick up Brendan Slocumb's The Violin Conspiracy and read it, but I'm certainly glad I did. Slocumb's story grabbed me by the throat almost from the beginning, and it didn't let me loose until I'd turned the last page.

The story isn't new. Boy has talent. Boy needs violin. Boy gets violin. Boy works hard. Boy starts to get some breaks. Boy's violin is stolen. Can boy's dreams still come true? But if the only books that mattered were those with completely new show more plots, very few books would matter at all. Some stories are universal and deserve to be told over and over again.

Some of the characters aren't new either. The self-absorbed mother who wants Ray to stop making all that racket, get his GED, and get hired on at the hospital so he can buy her that 60-inch color TV she wants. The greedy family who, when they learn that the old family fiddle none of them gave a hoot about is actually a priceless Stradivarius, see nothing but DOLLAR SIGNS and insist that Ray sell it so they can wallow in millions of dollars. The evil couple who insists that the violin is theirs. The fairy godmother of a college music professor. Even Ray isn't new.

But guess what? Those tried-and-true characters we've seen thousands of times are just as fine as that "old" story because of the way Brendan Slocumb breathes life into it all. We care about Ray. We want him to succeed. We want to tackle every bigot the young boy has to face and get them out of his way for good. Our hearts soar as music fills every pore in Ray's body and then comes out in a brilliant torrent as he plays that old family fiddle. You don't have to love classical music to enjoy this book, but-- if you do-- it's going to add that extra Something Special.

The identity of the violin thief is easy to deduce, but how the theft was accomplished and what happened to the thief made up for that. The author explains how much of The Violin Conspiracy actually happened in his notes and acknowledgments, and I also watched a video of one of his appearances on Youtube in which Slocumb stated, "I want to be the Stephen King of musical thrillers!" After falling head over heels into this first book of his, all I can say is that I hope his wish comes true. show less