Broken Harmony is a mystery set in the 1730s in Newcastle, England. Charles Patterson is a harpsichord player who aspires to lead the city's small chamber orchestra. However, Patterson has an arch rival, first violin Henri Le Sac, and it is he who leads the orchestra. The two men compete for students, which only inflames their antagonism towards each other. Then a cherished violin belonging to Henri le Sac, disappears, quickly followed by le Sac himself. When the young apprentice he inherited from his rival is gruesomely murdered, Patterson starts to feel out of his depth.

There is a supernatural element to the story. We quickly learn that hauntings are a part of everyday existence. Spirits, it seems, usually take a hundred years before they leave the place where death occurred. Patterson's landlady, Mrs Foxton, is still running her establishment despite her incorporeality, while on stormy nights the ghosts make the streets an eerily frightening place.

I found this book to be very slow moving. The murder doesn't occur until almost two thirds of the way through the book. I never really became interested in the characters or the world of music they live in. I think if you are involved in music and like quirky, paranormal mysteries you might like this. I didn't hate it, but I don't believe I'll continue with the series.
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This is a bit of an oddity, but none the worse for that. It's a mystery set in the 1730s in Newcastle, written by a musicologist, so you can be assured that the occupation of the main characters is going to be convincing. Charles Patterson is a harpsichord player (though he's proficient on other instruments too) who aspires to lead the city's small chamber orchestra, a position he thinks should be his by right. However, Patterson has an arch rival, first violin Henri Le Sac, and it is he who leads - and, as Patterson grudgingly admits, is a virtuoso player, dextrous and showy, to the frequent delight of audiences. Patterson himself, meanwhile, is proficient and an excellent leader, but unexciting. The two men vie for pupils, as well, as teaching provides an important supplementary income, and it only exacerbates their antagonism that each has a friend who is a dancing master. Indeed, if anything, Demsey and Nichols hate each other even more than the two musicians.

The oddity comes with the story's supernatural element. We quickly learn that hauntings are a part of everyday existence - spirits, it seems, usually take a hundred years before they leave the place where death occurred - and I can imagine that some readers will feel uncomfortable with the notion that ghosts, if they can be found, can reveal the identity of their murderers, but there are constraints on the ways this can happen, and anyway, there's something about the 18th-century world which is amenable to the paranormal, perhaps because it gave birth to the gothic. I found that I quickly accepted the spirits almost as part of the period detail - which, not surprisingly, is excellent, since the author's own research area is 18th-century music-making. She evokes Newcastle of the time, a provincial city surrounded by by coalmines, to great effect, persuading me that it's every bit as fascinating as London or Edinburgh.

There's a slightly longer version of this review at http://geraniumcatsbookshelf.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/broken-harmony-by-roz-southe... ( )