I’ve read my fair share of thrillers / mystery novels over the years and while occasionally, I’ll come across one that completely blows me away (a recent example that comes to mind is Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot), there comes a point where most of the thrillers I read start to sound so similar that I feel like it’s a waste of time to pick them up. Given this context, when one of my book clubs decided to choose a thriller for our monthly read, I couldn’t help but feel just a tad bit weary – I even debated at one point whether I should pick this one up or not. In the end, I decided to go for it, and I’m so glad I did because this one turned out to be more than just a “run-of-the-mill” thriller. In fact, I would even say that the thriller / mystery aspect was more of a sub-arc than the main story (more on this later).
Ray McMillian has a passion for playing the violin and also the natural talent to match, but as a Black kid growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, he has neither the resources nor the opportunities to realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. Aside from the fact that his family doesn’t support him – his mom wants him to get a “real” job in order to pay the bills, while the rest of his aunts and uncles are to absorbed with their own lives to care about his impractical dreams – there’s also the reality of the inherent racism in the classical music world, which Ray has already gotten a glimpse of being the only Black kid in his high school music class (his teacher essentially refuses to teach him and the white kids go out of their way to make him feel that he doesn’t belong there). Only his Grandma Nora, whom he goes and visits every couple of months, loves and supports him unconditionally. On one of his visits, his grandma gives him a fiddle that once belonged to his great-grandfather. Later on, Ray meets Dr. Janice Stevens, a music teacher at Markham University who becomes his mentor — her support, along with his great grandfather’s precious fiddle, help Ray tap into his potential and puts him on the path to realizing his dream. But then he discovers that the fiddle he now owns is actually a rare Stradivarius worth millions of dollars, and almost immediately, two families try to lay claim to it — Ray’s own family, including his mother, as well as the descendants of the family that had once enslaved his great-grandfather. However, the worst is yet to come when, o few weeks before the Tchaikovsky Competition, Ray’s violin is stolen, throwing his life into upheaval and threatening everything he had worked for. As Ray embarks on a desperate mission to find his violin, he begins to lose hope that he will ever see his precious Strad again.
On the surface, the narrative seems to revolve around the mystery of the stolen violin, but the story actually goes much deeper than that. To me, the main story arc actually revolves around Ray’s journey to realizing his dream of becoming a professional violinist and the many obstacles he faced because of the color of his skin. In Brendan Slocumb’s author’s note at the back of the book (which is an absolute must-read!), he talks about how some of the most racially charged events in the book were actually based on his own life experiences as a Black man and violinist trying to forge his path in the mostly White arena of classical music. He also writes how, when he shares his encounters with racism with friends who don’t look like him, he usually gets a variation of the “it can’t be true / things aren’t really like that” reaction — wanting to recount his experiences as well as paint a realistic picture of the kinds of struggles that people of color face everyday, are partly what inspired him to write this book. [Case in point: as I’m writing this review, a story just popped up in the news about a cop in Phoenix who put a Black journalist in handcuffs when all he did was interview customers in front of a bank.] As a person of color who also grew up in an environment where few people looked like me, I definitely resonated with that aspect of the story and appreciate Slocumb sharing his experiences through the character of Ray.
I’m terms of the “whodunnit” portion of the story — to be honest, it really wasn’t too hard to figure out (which I already did way early in the story). With that said, I liked the inventiveness of the story in terms of how the violin “kidnapping” played out. After a slew of similar-feeling thrillers, I find it refreshing to read a thriller that felt so different from the usual fare, even if the “mystery” portion of the story was not as strong.
This was an absolutely worthwhile read, though not an easy one by any means, as there were some gut-wrenching, visceral scenes that honestly made my blood boil (especially knowing some of those scenes were based on real life events). Nevertheless, I appreciate the sincerity and honesty that comes through in Slocumb’s writing – specifically in the way he brings his characters to life. This was a fine debut effort and I’m definitely looking forward to his second book (which is scheduled to come out in a couple months).
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