Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

A superbly entertaining insight into the darker side of early 20th-century English music… Utterly quirky, informative fun

Classical Music

A baroque intellectual thriller, wittily erudite and psychologically acute. Jessold joins Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn and Randall Jarrell's Gottfried Rosenbaum in the gallery of memorable composers in fiction

Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise

A tremendously imaginative novel... beneath its sparkling surface there are some very murky depths. A wonderfully disquieting read

Sarah Waters

As quick-witted and clever as its predecessors... An entertainment of unusual class and penetration. And the tunes are great

Daily Telegraph

His handling of dry comic dialogue and cynical affectation is reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse... an intelligent, fun and thoughful piece of fiction

Independent on Sunday

Imaginative exploration of the era

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, Financial Times

Nothing in recent fiction prepared me for the power and the polish of this subtle tale of English music in the making, a chiller wrapped in an enigma

New Stateman

Subtle, funny and chilling, this delicious novel of music and murder unfolds among composers and critics of the 1910s and 1920s. Stace plays his deadly variations with real brio in a richly entertaining performance

i

The whodunit is a mere pretext for witty debate

New Yorker

We might have predicted that Wesley Stace - a fine novelist and a fine musician - would one day write a novel about music, but could we have predicted that it would be so brilliant? The dialogue sparkles, the prose glimmers, and for once you leave a novel not just haunted by the characters and the story, but humming the tunes. A delightful Opus 3

Jonathan Coe

Wesley Stace is a brilliant and intensely original writer and this is his most unusual book yet

Audrey Niffenegger