The Atlantic fog steals warmth, and sometimes names. But nothing suffocates like a note held too long by a cold heart.
Musicologist Evelyn March arrives in Greyhaven, Maine, summoned to Barrow House, a weather-beaten cliffside estate above Wolfe Point Lighthouse. Her task seems simple: authenticate a newly unearthed score by reclusive composer Anton Barrow, a mass titled Requiem of the Unknown. The commission comes from Barrow's widow, Cecily, and his estranged children, Jonah and Mae, who have not agreed on a single thing since the composer's sudden death three decades earlier. In the piano room where a salt-stung Steinway sits beneath a cracked skylight, Evelyn finds penciled marginalia, a ledger of choir auditions, and reel-to-reel tapes labeled only Unknown.
A nor'easter locks the household in with flickering generator lights and the low toll of the lighthouse bell. No one seems to recall the soprano with no name whose voice haunts the tapes, but the ledgers tell a different story. When the groundskeeper, Wylie Tran, is found at dawn in the kelp below the observation deck, and Evelyn narrowly survives a carbon monoxide leak in the soundproofed practice room, suspicion tightens like a wire under a lid. Someone is tuning the past to a murderous pitch, and the score at the center of it all may be an admission, not a masterpiece.
As Evelyn pieces together the choir's fractured histories, a vanished singer, and a memorial service that never happened, loyalties splinter. Locked trunks, a brass metronome streaked with verdigris, a pocket watch stopped at 2:17, and a postcard from Venice point to a secret Anton Barrow composed into silence. Trapped by weather and lies, Evelyn must decide which voice to trust before the final movement ends in the dark.
Chilling as a fogged-in cove and relentless as the tide, Requiem of the Unknown unspools a coastal maze of jealousy, ambition, and buried identities where every echo has a name—and a cost.
