The Adagio
Jack Duncan likes women—even married ones. An amateur actor in 1960s Omaha, Nebraska, he’s started a steamy affair with his married costar, Louise Thompson. But when her husband discovers them in flagrante dilecto, Robert Thompson takes a peculiar revenge on Duncan, giving him his prized recording of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. While listening to the record, Duncan is disconcerted by a scream he hears embedded in the climactic chord. And when he discovers the bodies of Louise and Robert, he knows instantly that their murders and the eerie recording must somehow be connected.
Duncan is suspected of killing the couple and becomes both the pursued and pursuer as he flees to New York City, beginning a hellish four-year mission to discover the source of the scream. He hides among derelicts near Shea Stadium, prowls Carnegie Hall where the Adagio was recorded, and learns of a strange, reclusive man who once lived in Carnegie’s tower. Hunted by the law and his own past, Duncan has one chance to prove his innocence—if only he can stop the scream from echoing in his brain.
Lush with the language and attitude of the 1960s and 1970s, The Adagio is a gritty, hard-boiled detective novel that will haunt you long after the last page is turned.
Excerpt One
Samuel Barber's music was winding a chrysalis around me. The cellos were a Greek Chorus sounding a mournful warning that something terrible lay ahead. The violins and violas continued their slow progression upward, continued spinning their threads, until at last the cellos, left far behind, fell silent. Freed from their mothering restraint, the violins seized on a shrill chord of ecstasy—or madness.
Excerpt Two
I switched off the light, stretched out on the couch, and let the music lull me to sleep.
I was still asleep, or in some hazy state between sleep and waking, when I heard the scream. A woman’s scream.
It went on and on as I lay there, electrified. I sat up—or woke up—I couldn’t tell which came first. But fully awake, I heard no scream, only the soft final bars of Barber’s Adagio.
.....
I was about to turn off the stereo, but the Adagio was just beginning again, and I couldn’t resist hearing it one more time.
.....
This time through, the music seemed not so much to be spinning a cocoon as trying to escape from something—Sisyphus pushing the stone up the mountain, or someone drowning, struggling to the surface only to sink again, tugged gently back by the cellos, but never giving up, and finally arriving at the brilliant, shrill, high chord. Heaven? Redemption? But finding there instead a greater agony. A piercing shriek of music.
There it was again! My eyes flew open. Not just strings. A woman screaming!
Excerpt Three
For some time I stood across from Carnegie Hall in a conjuring stupor, as though it might speak to me like an oracle, might tell me what had happened inside it that day.
A speck appeared in a corner of my field of vision. Irritating. I brought it into focus.
It was a man standing behind a window several floors above Carnegie’s entrance. Although lots of people were on the street, walking past me in both directions, the man’s eyes seemed fastened on me. I walked several steps away and looked again. He was still staring at me.