Daniel Jacobus is a blind, reclusive, crotchety violin teacher living in self-imposed exile in rural New England. He spends his time chain-smoking, listening to old LPs, and occasionally taking on new students, whom he berates in the hope that they will flee. Jacobus is drawn back into the world he left behind when he decides to attend The Grimsley Competition at Carnegie Hall. The young winner of this competition is granted the honor of playing...

Dogged by internal dissension and by a potentially devastating lawsuit from its fired second violinist, the famed New Magini String Quartet is on the brink of professional and personal collapse. The quartet pins its hopes on a multi-media Carnegie Hall performance of Franz Schubert's masterpiece, "Death and the Maiden," to resurrect its faltering fortunes. But as the fateful downbeat approaches, a la Agatha Christie, one by one the quartet's musicians...

"Blind violinist Daniel Jacobus is living in self-imposed exile and enjoying a peaceful Christmas Eve when he receives an anxious phone call from obscure violin-maker Amadeo Borlotti, urgently requesting a meeting. In their festivity, Daniel Jacobus and his dear friends Nathaniel and Yumi make light of it and dismiss Borlotti's request. But when Borlotti goes mising after a fire in his shop, it's up to Jacobus and his team to investigate the disappearance....

A freak summer storm severs an island music festival in the middle of Utah’s Great Salt Lake from the mainland. When one festival administrator, and then a second, is found dead, can curmudgeonly Daniel Jacobus solve the murders before his protégée, violinist Yumi Shinagawa, becomes the third victim?