I was hoping this would be a great book. I know very little about chamber music but insufferable stereotypes (grumpy, elderly, quip-prone violin master, African American caretaker, and brilliant Asian American student) I can spot a mile away. The musicians were more richly drawn, as well as the descriptions of the pressurized world of performance chamber music. I wish the author had just stuck with that. ( )

“A good conductor has enough sense to basically let the orchestra play on its own, guiding it along a path without imposing his will upon it. Both the great conductor and the lousy conductor try to control all the details. The difference is that the great conductor knows how to do it; the lousy one thinks he knows.”

Daniel Jacobus is not a conductor and it is only in the past few years that he has been willing to interact with other human beings. That does not stop him from believing that he knows how best to control all the details of the lives of those few, those very few, intrepid souls who are willing to allow Jacobus to order them around.

It has been a few years since the end of DANCE MACABRE and Daniel is spending more time in New York than he is in his cabin in the Berkshires. His friend, Nathaniel Williams, has known Jacobus since their college days, since before Jacobus lost his vision and his profession as a concert violinist. Nathaniel puts up with Jake and puts Jake up when the man leaves his mountain home to indulge his soul in the sounds of the classical music world in New York City. Jake is particularly interested in the blooming career of his former pupil, Yumi Shinagawa, who has been the second violinist of the world-renowned New Magini String Quartet for five years.

The quartet has been contracted to play Franz Schubert’s “Death And The Maiden” in Carnegie Hall, part of the international celebration of Schubert’s 200th birthday. Aaron Kortovsky, first violin, Pravda Lenskaya, cello, Annika Haggen, viola, and Yumi, second violin, have an arrangement to meet at Carnegie Hall to rehearse “Death And The Maiden” but Aaron doesn’t show up. After a number of frantic phone calls, the group realizes that no one has seen or heard from Aaron since the end of their South American tour.

The New Magini Quartet has more problems than their missing violinist. In an attempt to improve the bottom line for the quartet, i.e. the number of people who paid for tickets to a performance, Aaron had decided that the group needed to conduct a “market study”. The results of the market study led to the hiring of Yumi and the “firing” of Crispin Short, allegedly on the basis of musical incompatibility. Since Crispin has a mirror, he knows that music isn’t the issue and he files suit against all the members of the quartet, including Yumi. Young and attractive brings in the young and the monied and the quartet needs the money.

The bigger sin, according to Jake, is that the quartet has joined forces with Power Ramsey, the force behind The Movement, who has choreographed a dance interpretation of “Death And The Maiden”, that will be performed as a bridge between the musical performance and the recording of Marion Anderson singing the lyrics of “Death And The Maiden.” Too much going on so too much that can go wrong.

Aaron’s continued absence leads Jake to a telephone partnership with a police investigator in Lima who has a body without a face that may be Aaron. When the remaining members of the quartet begin finding the finger of a fairly recently alive person in their music cases, the fear factor rises.

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, the third book in the Daniel Jacobus series, finds Jake a somewhat different man. He has grown a sense of humor which shows up as some very funny one-liners that leads the reader to laugh and groan at the same time. There are sentences that contain such information as, “…burgeoning law firm, Palmese, Leibowitz, and O’Neil, or PLO, as their adversaries called it.” Elias has been creative with the names of some of his characters, too.

Gerald Elias has certainly allowed his characters to grow and change, a brilliant move given the passage of time between the first and third books. Yumi was still a child in THE DEVIL’S TRILL; now she is a successful member of a high-pressure, challenging, cut-throat profession. Jacobus has become less angry, less inclined to punish himself by punishing the people around him. Nathanial has changed the least but Nathaniel is true north in Jake’s life. As long as Daniel knows where Nathaniel stands, he knows his own place. Nathaniel gives Jacobus no quarter, forcing him to face his limitations and push beyond them.

The books in the series are THE DEVIL’S TRILL, DANCE MACABRE, and DEATH AND THE MAIDEN. All of the titles refer to classical music. The third book references some things in the first two so, although it isn’t strictly necessary, readers may enjoy the books more if read in order of publication.

However a reader chooses to make the acquaintance of Daniel Jacobus, it should be done soon because Daniel and friends are worth knowing. ( )