Doubleday
Published May 13, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Like most kids, Curtis Wilson loves superhero comic books. Unlike most kids, he also loves playing the cello. This is a challenge, because he lives in Southeast D.C. in a rough neighborhood where the most promising career path is working for a drug kingpin, like his father Zippy does. Though he’s able to participate in a school music program, just getting transportation to and from lessons is hard – his father thinks it’s all a distraction from the work he’s destined to do – but Larissa, a mother figure for Curtis, tries to make it work. Curtis’s teacher knows he’s something special: a true virtuoso. It’s only when the value of his talent becomes clear that he is able to lean into his art, becoming celebrated as a prodigy. Zippy, imprisoned for a time on a drug charge, likewise discovers he has a talent for numbers and reenters society as an accountant for a seemingly altruistic organization, referred by the drug kingpin who has connections with the wealthy and powerful. Life is good – until the FBI shows up.
The organ transplant organization that Zippy works for not only has bypassed the legal distribution of scarce and desperately needed medical help, it’s a criminal enterprise. Caught in a bind, he agrees to testify against his bosses, but their reach is long and deadly. Curtis finds himself abruptly yanked from the concert stage to join his father and Larissa in the witness protection program.
The first section of the novel focuses on Curtis’s relationship with music and how hard it is for his extraordinary talent to flourish. The second deals with being in the program – taking on identities that don’t allow him to be the cello player he had been. When he can’t resist the urge to perform, it puts them all in danger, while the FBI’s case appears to have reached a dead end. In the final section, Curtis, Zippy, and Larissa discover they each have a talent that, combined, helps them tell their story in a music-rap-comic book fusion that they put online as a web comic. As they create stories about The Dark Maestro that largely go unnoticed, they begin to chafe at their situation. The heroic stories they are creating, with music scored by Curtis, inspire them to use their new art to do what the FBI has failed to do: bring the men who ruined their lives and cost the lives of countless others to justice.
In all three of Slocum’s novels, music plays a central role, as does the ways race relations make the classical music world a difficult place for African American musicians. There’s something deeply moving in the way the author writes about the way making music affects his characters, bringing that feeling to readers while also crafting suspenseful plots. In the sections of the novel when Curtis can’t play music, we feel his frustration, and when the music comes back, transformed into a web-based art form, we’re eager to follow the three of them into wherever the music leads them.
Though the final section (or movement?) of the story is arguably over the top, with dastardly and all-powerful bad guys facing off with heroes with super talents on a do-or-die quest, it’s a fitting tribute to the comic book tradition and the author’s imagined merging of comics and classical music. All in all, the novel is compelling and inventive, with a passion for music as its beating heart.