He continues his education in the face of his mother's insistence that he get a job and help out with household finances, faces the disdain of many teachers and fellow students as a young Black man performing classical music, and learns big truths about how much money is needed to pursue this kind of creative calling. In the course of Ray's struggle to raise the $5 million in Bitcoin the thieves demand, we learn about his personal struggles. One evening as they're about to leave for dinner, Ray opens his case to check on his violin and finds it gone, a white Converse sneaker with a ransom note in its place. Ray decides to hole up in a Manhattan hotel with his delightful girlfriend, violist Nicole. Soon Ray's family and another (white) family will try to claim his beloved violin, with stakes increasing as he prepares for the most important event of his young career - competing in Moscow's Tchaikovsky Competition.

Eventually, after he's been awarded a full scholarship to college, a professional luthier recognizes the fiddle as a genuine Stradivarius, worth millions of dollars. Young Ray's mother never encouraged his delight in the violin, but his grandmother loved to hear him play, and insisted he take his grandfather's fiddle.Īlthough caked with years of rosin and missing a chin piece and a bridge, Ray sees the violin's worth and cobbles together money for its repair. A violinist, performer and lifelong music teacher, in his online biography he says that becoming a musician saved his life: 'Friends grew up with are today sitting in jail when they were out running the streets, was in rehearsals.' The author's protagonist Rayquan (Ray) McMillian has had a similar trajectory. Polemic rarely works in fiction, and that's for a very good reason: Fiction begets empathy, and polemic encourages attack.īut in his debut thriller The Violin Conspiracy, Brendan Slocumb employs polemic about racism to great effect as he reminds us that the high-toned world of classical music suffers from, and because, of racism.

The violin conspiracy book