DEATH BY SAXOPHONE
by Debbie Burke
In Burke’s latest novel, a music lover finds herself in the middle of a criminal conspiracy involving rare Soviet-era recordings.
The career of successful smooth jazz musician Jerry Zolotov is in decline. Instead of trying to update his sound or record new music, he’s turned his attention—and remaining wealth—to collecting some of the rarest jazz bootlegs: the so-called bone records, ingeniously and illegally printed in the Soviet Union using X-ray film. Jerry is particularly set on attaining the Holy Grail of these records, which has just come on the market; it was created using an X-ray of “the right arm, left wrist and all ten fingers that had been broken and belonged to a little girl whose father happened to be a tyrant named Joseph Stalin.” Not long after purchasing the record for the tidy sum of $2.7 million, Jerry begins to receive menacing black roses backstage at his shows. When Jerry drives out to play his saxophone in the middle of New York’s Verrazano Bridge late one night, he ends up taking a dive into the Narrows below. Meanwhile, MRI technician and amateur accordion player Becka Rifkin travels to Russia to reconnect with an old boyfriend from her childhood in Brooklyn. She’s also hoping to purchase a bone record while she’s in the country. She finds a seller and learns that word on the street is Jerry Z’s death wasn’t an accident, but a murder related to his possession of the Stalin record. Becka buys a bone record anyway—an apparently innocuous one with no famous backstory. But she soon finds herself in the midst of an international scheme of intrigue and murder far beyond anything she bargained for.
Burke’s prose is gritty and flecked with colorful details, as when Becka meets with bone record dealer Sofia, who lights a cigarette: “There was no air circulation, and the films definitely shouldn’t be exposed to smoke. Becka wouldn’t dare bring this up to Sofia, though, whose compact, muscular frame could probably rip Becka’s head from her neck and then stuff her inside one of the walls if her favor turned to rage.” There’s lots of imagination on display in these pages, and Burke paints an evocative portrait of the jazz musicians, aficionados, and mobsters of Brooklyn’s Eastern European community. The bone records themselves, which have roots in a real-life phenomenon, are fascinating, and Burke succeeds in bringing them to ominous, alluring life on the page. Unfortunately, the story takes a while to get going, and readers will not always be sure why they’re receiving particular pieces of information. Rather than scenes, Burke prefers long passages of exposition or quick dialogue exchanges. Chronologies become muddled, and needless flashbacks crowd out the present. The novel turns out to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, which makes for a particularly unsatisfying ending. Although there are many fine parts here, they never quite cohere into something greater than their sum.An ambitious but shapeless crime novel involving some of Russia’s strangest cultural artifacts.