"Who would want to kill Tomaso Rainaldi, an elderly, unassuming violin-maker in the quiet Italian city of Cremona? For his friend and fellow violin-maker Gianni Castiglione, the murder is as mysterious as it is shocking. Rainaldi had few possessions, no enemies and little money. No one - least of all the police - can fathom a motive for murdering him. All he really had was an obsessive love of violins." "And an encyclopaedic knowledge of them. Supposing he knew more than anyone else - not just about famous violins, but about missing violin? Ones of the caliber of the fabled Messiah, Stradivari's most sublime creation, the Mona Lisa of the music world. A violin now in the Ashmolean in Oxford - and worth [pound]10 million." "Aided by his friend, policeman Antonio Guastafeste, Gianni starts to investigate the dead man's affairs. Affairs that reveal an appointment in Venice with the eccentric and exceedingly rich violin-collector Enrico Forlani, and a trail that winds back to a mysterious musical past - and a far from harmonious future." "Retracing Rainaldi's steps, the two men find themselves involved in a sequence of startling events that lead to another murder, a mysterious Englishman and an unscrupulous violin-dealer. A train of events that careers across Italy and England as they become players in a game where musical instruments change hands for millions, where forgery is an art form and the preferred method of negotiation is murder."--BOOK JACKET.