During a performance of Strauss' tone poem 'A Hero's Life', the obnoxious conductor Sir Noel Grampian is shot dead in full view of the Orchestra. He had many enemies, musicians and music critics among them, but to be killed in mid flow suggests an act of the coldest calculation. Told through the letters of Detective Inspector Alan Hope to his wife as he puzzles over his findings, and other documents such as musical notation holding clues to the crime. A British Library Crime Classic.