Triade minore

A love triangle, an unexpected inheritance, the finding of a lost suitcase and some long- forgotten music.
A fascinating, overwhelming debut, intelligent, powerful and original.

English Sample Available

Cardiff, May 2015: Brynmor Davis, head of Music Programming at BBC Wales, is a middle-aged man with only one deep remorse in life: twenty years earlier he sent a young colleague of his, Iwan Price, to interview a famous English pianist on the occasion of her 90th birthday. An outwardly simple assignment but one that will prove fatal, in which the young man lost his life on his way back in a strange car accident.
What could the police possibly want from him now? Simply to hand him a bag that’s property of the BBC. Brynmor recognises it immediately: it is Iwan’s bag. But the bag can’t, shouldn’t exist any longer since it was burnt in the fire that engulfed his car. How was it spared? And why are they returning it to Brynmor only now, after twenty years? And, above all, what does it contain?
Brynmore wants to get to the bottom of this and starts investigating the last years of Iwan’s life. A complex and mysterious plot emerges from the young man’s past: a false diplomat, a huge bequest, three characters who lived in pre- revolutionary Russia. Nikolai Medtner, the 20th century pianist and composer, practically forgotten from the annals of music history, his older brother Emilii Medtner and Anna Medtner, née Bratenshi, who was married to both of them.

What does this murky triangle straddling two wars have to do with Iwan’s death? And with Brynmor’s life?