Whimsy's not cozy when it's dying.

An old roommate strangled with a violin string. A city quietly losing its color, its laughter, its will to play. Seven days before the silence becomes permanent.

Dekker Kohl is forty-two, war-scarred, and hasn't written a song worth keeping in months. He's a Trovatore for the hidden Columbus Conservatory—a magical investigator. The dead man in the German Village kitchen was his oldest friend. He was also the secret Guardian of Whimsy, the Virtue keeping color, laughter, and play in the world.

Now Whimsy is dying. Streetlights flicker. Children sit motionless in neglected parks. A six-legged cat purrs in the wrong key. And the Department of Harmonic Regulation has sent their own investigator—the same Department quietly building chambers that drain creativity from the artists they target.

With an instrument that is definitely not a lute on his back, a teenage apprentice he didn't ask for, and a case no one wants him to close, Dekker has seven days to find the killer.

If he fails, the world won't end. It'll just stop being worth living in.

The Virtuosi Chronicles, Book 1.

For fans of Rivers of London and Mike Carey's Felix Castor who like their magic with a jazz soundtrack and their detectives with a fencing habit.