Somebody strangled my oldest friend with a violin string. Then the whole city started forgetting how to laugh.

My name is Dekker Kohl. I'm forty-two, war-broken, and I haven't written a song worth keeping in months. I call it a dry spell. It's a symptom.

I work magical crime for a hidden conservatory in Columbus, Ohio, which sounds more glamorous than it pays.

Turns out Felix wasn't just my old roommate. He was the secret Guardian of Whimsy—the magic keeping color, laughter, and play in the world. With him dead, it's bleeding out. Streetlights flicker. Children sit motionless in the parks. And it's not just my beer that's flat.

The government department that "treats" the creativity out of artists has sent its own investigator, and it's not here to help. Whoever's draining Whimsy started long before Felix stopped breathing, which means they're not finished.

I've got seven days, an instrument that is definitely not a lute, and a teenage apprentice who insists that it is. He also thinks I'm a bard. Bards are weekend warriors in puffy pants at a ren faire. I'm the guy with twenty years of unfinished arguments with a dead man, and one apology left worth making: find his killer.

If I fail, the world won't end; it'll just stop being worth living in.

The Virtuosi Chronicles, Book 1. A fantasy noir murder mystery for fans of The Dresden Files and Rivers of London who like their magic with a jazz soundtrack and their detectives with a fencing habit.