Beethoven's Assassins

Music, mesmerism and masonic secrets are the ingredients of a richly comic, immensely ingenious page-turner with plotlines sprawling across centuries. A mislaid USB stick in a Scottish mansion could solve the mystery of Beethoven's dying words and reveal a lost opera - yet the writer who discovers it is more concerned with his own declining career. By turns farcical and philosophical, with bravura wit reminiscent of Jonathan Coe, intellectual intricacy worthy of Umberto Eco, and a multi-layered structure that will appeal to fans of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, this is literary fiction that wears its learning lightly: erudite, sophisticated and very funny.

The greatest opera Beethoven never wrote and the sister-in-law who wouldn’t keep quiet.