A children's hurdy-gurdy tune, haunting a small boy's nightmare; the same tune, played by an old blind beggar outside a foggy graveyard; heard by an old old woman, bed-ridden in her Bavarian fastness; yet again, at the dead of night on a London street corner, a prelude to a brutal crime...This is the opening of the story which then turns to the fortunes of Mattie Falconer, cruelly widowed and now courted by a man some would say was her husband's killer. As the sympathetic police inspector pursues a series of inexplicable killings, Mattie seeks escape and happiness in the violin-making town of Mittenwald. But it is here, in the cliff top house in Bavaria, that the dark music becomes more insistent and infinitely more menacing...Cover art by Neville Dear.