False Beats

Somebodys alibi is out of tune. Octavia Bird is the only one who can hear it.

Blind from birth and gifted with perfect pitch, Octavia knows every piano in Breckensford by its voice. Taking over her old mentors tuning round means winning her clients confidence—and remembering everything they say while forgetting shes in the room.

Her trial as the Corn Exchanges new tuner should be a chance to prove herself. Instead, hours after she tunes the halls prized Steinway, the trusts chairman is found dead at the foot of the backstage stairs.

Her younger brother, Kit, found the body. Now the police are looking closely at him.

Octavia keeps returning to what she heard that afternoon: raised voices through the ceiling, a tune whistled where nobody admits to being, and a piano that sounds right to everyone else—and wrong to her.

The detective considers an earwitness little better than a guesser. Her clients would prefer she kept her ears to herself. But with Kit under suspicion, Octavia cant afford to stop listening.

With her guide dog Crotchet beside her—a black Labrador cross with the dignity of a disappointed bishop—she must find the false note in somebodys story before her brother takes the blame for murder.

False Beats begins a clean, cozy mystery series set in a quarrelsome, music-loving English cathedral city, featuring carefully woven clues, dry humour and a sleuth who solves crimes by listening.