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 encyclopedic knowledge of them.
But what if he knew more than anyone else - not just about famous violins, but about missing violins? 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 Museum in Oxford - and worth millions…