Moon over Soho recap

Months after the Covent Garden affair, apprentice wizard Peter Grant investigates the death of a saxophonist who collapsed after a Soho gig - and whose body carries the vestigium of a jazz standard. The trail reveals a decades-long pattern of London jazzmen dying the same way, their vitality drained: the work of so-called jazz vampires. Peter's inquiry entangles him with Simone Fitzwilliam, the dead man's warm, old-fashioned lover, who becomes his own lover, while a parallel case - deaths and mutilations linked to a predatory woman of the demi-monde and to surgically engineered cat-girls - points to a trained black magician operating in London. That magician, dubbed the Faceless Man, fights Peter and escapes, his education traced to Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an Oxford don who taught magic illegally to a dining club called the Little Crocodiles. The jazz deaths resolve at the Cafe de Paris: Simone and her two sisters, killed there by a German bomb in 1941, have persisted ever since by unknowingly feeding on musicians. Confronted with their own deaths, they pass on. Peter is left grieving, the Faceless Man is at large, and Lesley May asks whether magic could mend her ruined face.

Previously: probationary constable Peter Grant took a witness statement from a ghost at a Covent Garden murder scene and was recruited by DCI Thomas Nightingale, the last sanctioned wizard in England, as the Folly's first new apprentice in decades. Together they hunted a revenant - the ghost of the eighteenth-century actor Henry Pyke, powered by Mr Punch, the ancient spirit of riot - which possessed ordinary Londoners, drove them to kill, and destroyed their faces. Peter also brokered a truce between Mother Thames and Father Thames, the rival deities of the river, whose peace was sealed by an exchange of hostages that sent Beverley Brook, the river spirit Peter had grown close to, upstream and out of reach. The case ended at a brutal price: Nightingale was shot in the chest and nearly died, and the revenant proved to have been riding Peter's friend and fellow officer Lesley May all along - when the spirit was driven out, her face was left in ruins. As this book opens, Nightingale is convalescing, Lesley is recovering at her family home in Essex, and Peter is carrying more of the Folly's caseload than any first-year apprentice should.

Dr Walid calls Peter to a body: Cyrus Wilkinson, a part-time jazz saxophonist who collapsed and died after a gig in Soho, apparently of natural causes - except that the corpse carries a vestigium, a magical echo, in the form of a jazz standard. That trace makes it Folly business. Working the dead man's circle, Peter meets Simone Fitzwilliam, Wilkinson's grieving, disarmingly old-fashioned lover, and feels an immediate pull toward her. To read the jazz world properly Peter leans on his father, Richard 'Lord' Grant, a once-promising trumpeter whose career heroin destroyed, and the older man's encyclopedic knowledge starts turning up a pattern: musicians have been dying like Wilkinson - suddenly, after playing, their spark gone - at intervals stretching back decades. The shape of it suggests something feeding on jazz players, and the Folly's old files give the phenomenon a name: jazz vampires. Meanwhile Peter juggles his training, a convalescent Nightingale who insists on the fundamentals, and a murder team led by DS Miriam Stephanopoulos handling the parts of the case that can be written down in a normal report.

The investigation widens along two tracks. The jazz-vampire pattern firms up: victims across the decades share the same profile - working musicians, dead after playing, drained of the vital something that made them play - and the deaths cluster around Soho's clubs. At the same time a second, uglier case attaches itself to the Folly: men connected to the demi-monde turning up dead or mutilated in ways that point to a predatory woman with unnatural physical gifts, and to a level of deliberate, engineered strangeness that ordinary monsters do not manage. Peter's affair with Simone deepens into something consuming; she and her two sisters share a flat above Soho, living in a warm, slightly dated bubble of pleasure and appetite. Peter's father begins edging back toward music. And beneath both cases runs a disquieting new idea: some of what Peter is seeing - the engineered women, the deliberate cruelty - looks less like wild magic than like the work of a person: someone trained, active, and entirely outside the Folly's knowledge or authority.

The black-magician thread comes to the front. The trail of the engineered women - including surgically and magically created cat-girls - leads through Soho's sex trade to premises where someone has been conducting experiments on human beings, and the Folly's research puts a name to the origin of the problem: Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a deceased Oxford academic who had trained at the Folly's old school and then, against every rule, taught Newtonian magic to members of a university dining club called the Little Crocodiles. At least one of his students became genuinely capable and genuinely amoral. Peter meets that student's work in person when a wizard with a blurred, unreadable face - fast, precise, and casually willing to kill - confronts him and escapes; Peter dubs him the Faceless Man. It is now clear London has an active black magician with resources and projects of his own. Meanwhile the jazz-vampire case keeps tightening around the world Simone inhabits, and details about her and her sisters - their history, their appetites, the eras their memories reach back to - are beginning to sit wrongly with Peter even as he falls harder for her.

The two cases resolve separately, and the jazz-vampire answer breaks Peter's heart: Simone Fitzwilliam and her sisters are the jazz vampires. Caught in the German bombing of the Cafe de Paris in 1941, they did not survive it - they persisted, revenants who have sustained themselves ever since by unknowingly drawing the life and talent out of jazz musicians, each of them believing the men simply moved on or faded. Cyrus Wilkinson was only the latest. Peter brings the truth to a confrontation at the Cafe de Paris itself, where, faced with the fact of their own deaths, the sisters cease feeding and pass on, leaving Peter grieving for a woman who was never quite alive. The Faceless Man remains at large, his connection to Wheatcroft and the Little Crocodiles now established, giving the Folly its first real map of an enemy: trained students of an illegal teacher, at least one of them brilliant and ruthless, with engineered chimeras among his works. Nightingale, still mending, sets the hunt for him as the Folly's long game. Peter's father, clean and fitted with new teeth, returns to playing. And in Essex, Lesley May asks Peter the question that will shape everything ahead: whether magic could repair her ruined face.

The book closes with the jazz vampire case resolved and a much larger threat opened. Simone Fitzwilliam and her sisters are gone: revenants of the 1941 Cafe de Paris bombing who had unknowingly sustained themselves for decades on the lives of jazz musicians, they were confronted with the truth of their deaths at the site of the bombing and allowed to pass on. Peter, who loved Simone, ends the case grieving as much as victorious. The parallel investigation leaves worse news behind: London has an active, highly trained black magician - the Faceless Man - who fought Peter and escaped, and whose projects include engineered human chimeras. His magical education traces back to Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a deceased Oxford academic who taught Newtonian magic outside the Folly's authority, and to the Little Crocodiles, Wheatcroft's old university dining club, giving the Folly a list of leads and a decades-deep institutional failure to reckon with. Nightingale continues to recover and takes the hunt for the Faceless Man as the Folly's central concern. Peter's father, fitted with new teeth and off the heroin, returns to playing, giving Peter back a piece of his family. And in Essex, Lesley May - her face ruined, her old career gone - asks Peter whether magic could repair what the possession destroyed, and reveals that she has a stake in the answer: the door to her entering the magical world is now open.