Lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins is used to defending murderers and occasionally investigating murders himself. But he can't round up the usual suspects this time. The blood-drenched body of Reinhold Schellenberg, a world-renowned German theologian, has been found on the altar of an old church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during Vespers on Saint Cecilia's day. Monty's investigation takes him on a road trip to Italy - to the corridors of power and the glittering museums of the Vatican, the elegant apartment of an operatic diva and the cloistered grounds of medieval monasteries.