Naples, 1822. The opening night of Conrad Scalese's latest opera is a huge success and things finally seem to be looking up for the impoverished librettist. The next morning he wakes up to discover the cast, crew, director and musicians have fled or gone into hiding, the opera house has been struck by lightning and burned to the ground and the Holy Inquisition are pounding on his door. In this version of history, music can cause miracles, including bringing the dead back, but such miracles are solely reserved for the polyphonic hymns of the Church. Miraculous operas are heretical. Conrad as an atheist is already on dangerous ground, and his future does not look good.

Only a timely intervention by the King of the Two Sicilies saves Conrad from the torture chamber, but his problems have only just begun. A powerful, heretical, devil-worshipping secret society have harnessed the power of opera and plan to bring about a horrifying miracle. Conrad must conceive, write, produce and direct a counter-opera to negate the dark miracle. He has six weeks, and the dangers posed by the ruthless secret society are nothing to the difficulties posed by discovering that his composer's wife is his own long-lost love.

It's a fantastically enjoyable read with an unusual story, mixing fantasy and history in a way that's nothing short of, well, operatic. The suitably epic ending stretches on a bit too long, but Gentle has about a million different elements to resolve, from the various terrifying physical dangers to assorted metaphysical questions which need to be confronted to the musical duel of competing operas and, most tangled and unfathomable and intractable of all, the classical problem of the love triangle, so it's not that it doesn't hold the interest, it's just that there's too much of it.