The Day Music Died. Tobias & Stuart, #1

Music is dead-and the world has forgotten how to sing. When Music-the ageless, androgynous presence that shadowed humanity's first stories-dies in a London flat, instruments are refiled as "old-world communicative devices". Melodies slip from memory. Only a few hear the hush that remains: Marion of Putney as her memory flickers; a sharp child in Birmingham; and Tobias Tam Staghorn, thirty-two, Associate Professor at Birmingham University, who suspects history has torn.
Tobias should be cataloguing relics. Instead, he follows a pattern hidden in wood, wire, and skin-parlour guitars with worn frets, a "telephone desk" that sings when its levers are pressed, hand-drums that once called the spirits. The trail runs through Barcelona auction rooms and along the canals and lecture halls of the Midlands, into snug pubs by the Thames. Allies gather: Marion and the ghost of her beloved saxman; Stevie and Daisy, who can still "see" what adults cannot; Lily the restorer and her serene assistant Troy; and a guarded trauma doctor with a keen eye.
The rule they share-felt more than stated-is simple and perilous: name the right tones, voice the right stories, and what was erased might be called back. But institutions are circling to strip rare artefacts for spectacle, Music flickers at the edge of forgetting, and Tobias must decide what he's trying to save: his field, his career, or the part of the human heart that hums. The Day Music Died is Book 1 of The Tobias & Stuart Trilogy. Content notes: one on-page intimate scene; minimal violence; occasional strong language.