Meanwhile, Rabbit is trying to work up the courage to come out to his sister while experiencing freedom to be gay for the first time in his life. Alice wants to know what happened to the roommate, but the mother is convinced it's just a prank. Her child prodigy roommate with the overcontrolling narcissistic mother recreates the suicide from 15 years ago, but then her body disappears. Alice is staying in the room where the murder-suicide happened. Rabbit and Alice are twins - he plays bassoon and she is a singer - attending the music festival.

15 years later, the hotel is hosting a regional high-school music festival. The book opens with a child witnessing a murder-suicide in a big hotel. For everyone has come to the Bellweather with a secret, and everyone is haunted.įull of knowing nods to the shivery pleasures of suspense and the transporting power of music, this is a wholly winning new novel from a writer lauded as “charming” ( Los Angeles Times), “witty” ( O, The Oprah Magazine), and “whimsical” ( People). The search for answers entwines a hilariously eccentric cast of characters-conductors and caretakers, failures and stars, teenagers on the verge and adults trapped in memories. Is it a prank, or has murder struck the Bellweather once again? Then one of the orchestra’s stars disappears-from room 712.

Now hundreds of high school musicians, including quiet bassoonist Rabbit Hatmaker and his brassy diva twin, Alice, have gathered in its cavernous, crumbling halls for the annual statewide festival the grown-up bridesmaid has returned to face her demons and a snowstorm is forecast that will trap everyone on the grounds. A high school music festival goes awry when a young prodigy disappears from a hotel room that was the site of a famous murder/suicide fifteen years earlier-in this “deliciously dark confection of a novel, and one of the most thoroughly enjoyable books I’ve read in years' (Celeste Ng).

The bellweather rhapsody