Sympathetic Strings

The tune is familiar. The key is wrong. And the man who wrote it is dead.

Every Advent, the country sings the Breckensford Carol. This year, the BBC will broadcast it from Breckensford Cathedral—and its brilliant, impossible composer, Graham Pruett, demands perfection.

For blind piano tuner Octavia Bird, that means fourteen school pianos. Again.

Surrounded by tinsel, choirboys and simmering grudges, Octavia hears something curious. As the staff Christmas party carries on down the corridor, someone hums outside her door. The pianos open strings answer: the famous carol, in the wrong key, with a descant she has never heard.

Hours later, Pruett collapses at the cathedral organ. The doctors blame his heart. Octavia suspects there is more to his final performance.

With a nineteen-year-old organ scholar under suspicion, her best friend furious with her and guide dog Crotchet feuding with the cathedral cat, Octavia must discover who was humming—and why that particular key matters.

The broadcast is days away. And someone has a secret they would rather the whole country never heard.

Sympathetic Strings is a clean, cozy Christmas mystery filled with musical clues, cathedral intrigue and a sleuth who knows that listening makes all the difference.