This book surprised me. All the way through to the book's final pages I was eager to see where this book would take me. The lead character is a septuagenarian composer on a train journey to Prague in October 1923, and throughout the book only referred to as J______, or the Maestro.

His train is delayed due to weather in a small Slovak town, and he decides to take a short stroll around the town during the break.

Hearing a woman's song he seeks out the song's singer so he may hear more of this tune and transcribe it, and so distracted fails to return in time for the train's resumption of the journey. This being 1923 it means the Maestro is stranded in this village for a few days whilst communication is sent to Prague and alternate transportation organised.

He determines to make the most of this and attempt to track down the singer he heard earlier. But what could be a pleasant stay in the town takes a downward turn though when he discovers the body of a young woman in the woods behind the house where he is staying.

Although there is no overt supernatural element in this book there is an undercurrent of menace and other worldliness in these pages. What there definitely is though is a wonderfully addictive story, of a type quite unlike my usual reading fare.

The language here is poetic, as much part of the book's appeal as the story itself. This is quite different from my usual tastes in fiction. Generally I like very plain writing, the less floweriness the better. Here though in this short novel the background and mood of each scene is as much the star of the book as either the plot or the characters.

The device of never naming the composer who takes the lead role in this book is interesting - and (as is explained in the book's introduction) quite appropriate the period in which this book is set, it was common in European novels prior to World War II. I'd not come across it before, but despite how it sounds it never felt a pretension.

As I said at the top, this book surprised me. But it was a most pleasant surprise.

Synopsis
En route from Bratislava to Prague in the deceptive spring of the 1920s, Leos Janacek, famed opera composer, ethnographer, and amateur psychologist, is stranded in an obscure and enigmatic mountain village, lured from his train by a song of blood. Here, Janacek must become a detective far from home. Attempting to solve a bizarre murder in which he himself is suspect — and whose perpetrator might be a wild animal, a jealous lover, or Nature unhinged — he brings to bear his singular skills of observation and poetic insight, and most importantly, his belief in the truthfulness of the "little melodies" heard in everyday life: the cry of a bird, the plash of snow from the eaves, the horrendous lie voiced with a smile. What he uncovers is a many-stranded aria of ravenous Nature and mischievous Time, threatening to consume his world.

David Herter, author of the acclaimed, stylish novels Ceres Storm and Evening's Empire, has written a rich and dark fantasy growing from the very roots of Janacek's idiosyncratic soul.