London, 1873. Amelia Thorne is thirty-six, unmarried, and a music transcriber scraping by in rented rooms above a disapproving landlady. Eight years ago, she buried her father, the composer Adam Thorne, and buried her questions about his sudden death along with him. She accepted the physician's diagnosis of pneumonia. She accepted the housekeeper's assurances. She accepted everything, because grief made her obedient and society had taught her that obedience was a woman's highest virtue.
Then Lord Ashcroft, Secretary of State for Home Affairs, dies under suspiciously similar circumstances and Amelia discovers his private journal hidden among her father's papers.
The journal is not written in words. It is written in music.
Scattered through Ashcroft's final entries are musical notations; deliberate, encoded compositions that use the distance between notes to spell names, dates, and locations. It is a cipher of extraordinary sophistication, and it was designed to be decoded by someone with absolute pitch, deep musical training, and a particular talent for hearing patterns beneath noise. Someone, Amelia realizes with a chill, exactly like her.
As she decodes the cipher, a conspiracy emerges from the margins: The Cadence, a secret organization that has infiltrated the highest levels of British government. Powerful lords meeting in the private rooms of an Egyptian-themed public house. Assassinations disguised as natural deaths. A shadowy figure known only as The Conductor, orchestrating corruption across Europe. And woven through it all, the unmistakable hand of her father, who may not have been the man she believed him to be.
Partnering with Inspector Julian Blackwood, a Scotland Yard detective pursuing the case against his superiors' explicit orders, Amelia is drawn into an investigation that will take her from the fog-shrouded streets of London to the salons of the aristocracy to the grand institutions of Vienna. Along the way, she will confront blackmailed widows, corrupt politicians, and the devastating possibility that her father did not merely document The Cadence's crimes but helped compose them.
With every movement of her father's encoded requiem that she decodes, the conspiracy grows larger, the danger grows closer, and the truth about Adam Thorne's death, or disappearance, grows more impossible to ignore. Someone is killing to keep The Cadence's secrets buried. Someone is watching Amelia's every move. And someone has been waiting eight years for a musician's daughter clever enough to hear the murder hidden in the music.
Conspiracy in the Shadows is a richly atmospheric Victorian mystery. It is a novel about music and deception, grief and defiance, and one woman's refusal to remain silent in a world that demands her obedience. At its heart, it asks a question with no easy answer: when the people we love turn out to be strangers, is the truth worth the cost of finding it?
Book One of the Amelia Thorne Mysteries... and the symphony has only just begun.
