Tomaso Rainaldi, an elderly, unassuming violin maker in the quiet Italian city of Cremona is brutally murdered. His friend and fellow-violin maker, Gianni Castiglione, begins to investigate the death, discovering a link to the fabled Messiah violin, Stradivari’s most sublime creation, the Mona Lisa of the music world. As Gianni probes deeper, he finds himself involved in a sequence of startling events that leads to another murder, a mysterious Englishman and an unscrupulous violin dealer. A train of events that careers across Italy and England as Gianni becomes a player in a game where musical instruments change hands for millions, where forgery is an art form and the preferred method of negotiation is murder…