Rare manuscript theft, forgery, crooked land developers, and the gangs of 1939 Swing musician Katy Green helps a friend, a music conservatory teacher in New York's roughest neighborhood, hunt for a stolen music manuscript, a rare autograph of a Paganini guitar quartet--perhaps a forgery. What Katy thinks will be an easy good deed swiftly turns into a deadly fugue of greed, jealousy, and zealotry, and a fight for her life. Her fight to keep a Chinese cellist friend from being deported evokes 2003, but Katy's in New York in 1939, before the Empire State Building has enough tenants, before all the subways have been built, when Hell's Kitchen gangs shoot homemade linoleum knives at people.