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Chopin Manuscript

by Jeffery Deaver (Goodreads Author), Alfred Molina (Narrator), Lisa Scottoline (Goodreads Author), P.J. Parrish (Goodreads Author), Jim Fusilli, David Corbett (Goodreads Author), John Gilstrap, Ralph Pezzullo , more…

3.42 of 5 stars 3.42 · rating details · 826 ratings · 131 reviews

15 thriller masters. 1 masterful thriller.

Former war crimes investigator Harold Middleton possesses a previously unknown score by Frederic Chopin. But he is unaware that, locked within its handwritten notes, lies a secret that now threatens the lives of thousands of Americans. As he races from Poland to America to uncover the mystery of the manuscript, Middleton will be ac...more

Audiobook, 8 pages

Published 2007 by Audible.com

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Mar 26, 2012 Angie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Book

The premise for this book created a two-level thriller. First, award-winning writer Jeffrey Deaver wrote the first chapter of an international thriller, challenged 14 colleagues to continue the story a chapter at a time, and assumed the ultimate challenge himself of tying up all the loose ends in the final chapters. The complicated plot (details in the product description) winds around the globe with munificent mayhem and bountiful betrayals before settling in the Baltimore-Washington ar...more The Book

The premise for this book created a two-level thriller. First, award-winning writer Jeffrey Deaver wrote the first chapter of an international thriller, challenged 14 colleagues to continue the story a chapter at a time, and assumed the ultimate challenge himself of tying up all the loose ends in the final chapters. The complicated plot (details in the product description) winds around the globe with munificent mayhem and bountiful betrayals before settling in the Baltimore-Washington area. Second, a major part of the thrill was to watch each author devise plot complications for later authors to unravel and to see how the later authors handled the material presented to them.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this collaborative approach. Not knowing how the later parts of the story will develop, neither the author of a chapter nor the listener/reader knows which new concept will become a main linchpin of the story and which will not be followed up at all. A listener/reader faces this type of challenge even in normal thrillers, but in a normal story conventions of good writing keep complete red herrings down to a more reasonable number. It can be fun and frustrating at the same time. In The Chopin Manuscript, lead author Jeffrey Deaver did a marvelous job of tying up loose ends masterfully, given the many strange and sometimes unlikely turns of the plot. There were several plot elements that were outstanding in my mind as lacking in credibility until Deaver explained them in the denouement.

As international thrillers go, the plot was probably not significantly more complicated or unlikely than the norm, and some of the characters were engaging,, such as the nineteen-year-old Polish violinist who is swept from being a street musician in Rome to being abducted internationally as part of an apparent terrorist plot.

If, as I did, you hoped this book would introduce you to some new authors whose work you might like to try later, you will probably not have that goal satisfied. For the most part the chapters were not really long enough to give you a good sense of the author's style, with a few exceptions such as the author whose lovingly portrayed scene of mayhem in the Dulles airport clearly told me what kind of writer HE is or Lisa Scottoline's chapter, which, at the other extreme, focused on the personal reaction of a young woman who sees all her plans for her future life being destroyed through no involvement of her own.

For the most part, although there were differences in style, the writing was compatible enough to flow fairly well, but there were some jarring dissonances, most notably to me two authors' tendency to have all the characters use profanity profusely. Some people talk that way, but if they do, it is consistent, and to have a character say “f---” multiple times in one chapter and not at all for a number of chapters after is disruptive.

The Audio Production

The reader did a good job with expression and with the many accents of the international cast of characters. He mispronounced a few words, and in this case I do not believe they were “britishisms”. Which brings up another issue: WHY was the narrator British? All of the authors with whom I was familiar are American, as was the protagonist. There were no British characters. A British voice is neither as neutral or as easy to comprehend as an American one for American listeners, and in this case I think it was not the best choice. Good reader, but not for this work.

My reaction to the technical aspects of the audio was mixed. There were unobtrusive but effective musical interludes to show the transition from one scene to another, in place of the space between paragraphs that normally fill that role in print. On the other hand, there were several places where the break between CDs could have been much better chosen, e.g., so that a chapter or a scene would begin at the beginning of a CD. The endings seemed very arbitrary, although there clearly was a lot of leeway---the last CD was only 44 minutes long, whereas some of the others were more than 70 minutes long. There was plenty of room to move things around.

Finally, since this was a collaborative effort, it is natural for the listener to want to know which author did which sections. At a list price of $29.95 I would expect at minimum a package insert or listing on the package of a Table of Contents with the authors listed next to their chapters.

Despite its flaws, this audio book is entertaining and engrossing enough to make a long car trip seem much shorter, and that makes it worth your consideration(less)

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Jul 12, 2011 Sean Wylie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Weird concept where each of about a dozen writers write 1 chapter of the book. At the half way point and there are WAY too many story lines. Basically 6 different 1st chapters. Hope the next authors are amazing at bringing them together. Otherwise this will be a FAIL

Well got to the end and it was OK. IT was Jeffery Deaver idea and therefore he wrote the first and last chapters. Well the other writers got so deep into sub-plots that Jeffery had to write 2 final chapters and was forced to accelera...more

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Aug 13, 2010 JC rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, audio, my-firsttime

The way that this book was written was what really made me interested in reading/listening to it (I found it through the Audie awards for being a well read audio book). Basically, John Deaver wrote the first chapter, handed it off to the next author who then wrote a chapter who then handed it off to the next author. 15 top thriller writers wrote a chapter and then Deaver brought it all together at the end. To be honest, considering the fact that 15 different authors wrote a chapter, the book cam...more

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Jan 15, 2009 Julie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: mystery, audiobooks

Did you ever play that game where one person starts a story and at a critical point, passes the role of storyteller onto the next person to finish? Well The Chopin Manuscript is just that type of book. The first chapter is written by best selling mystery author Jeffery Deaver. He sets up the overall plot, main characters, and passes it on. In all, 14 different mystery authors each get 1 chapter in this book, with Jeffery Deaver having the difficult task of tying everything up in the final 2 chap...more

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Jan 10, 2012 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: audiobook-2012, mystery, read-in-2012

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Aug 26, 2010 Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: audiobooked, 144booksin2010

I had hoped for more from this novel idea - a serial audiobook: a book specifically written with its audio performance in mind. Some chapters are stronger than others, and that is clear to even the least discerning of readers. At times, certain authors seemed to hijack the plotline, giving it desperate twists or details that seemed aberrant or unprecedented. The characterization of our hero in the second chapter especially stood out to me as an example of such, as did the addition of MT Connelly...more

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Aug 04, 2009 Michael rated it 2 of 5 stars

Just listened to this as an e-book read excellently by Alfred Molina. I'm not a Jeffrey Deaver fan but I was intriqued due to the concept of the story beginning/end being written bt Jeffrey Deaver and each chapter in between written by another well known mystery/crime writer (eg. Lee child, Lisa Scottoline). The story plot seemed interesting at first ( a war crimes investigator chasing down a famous music manuscript which had been hidden by the Nazi's and re-emerged in modern day Kosovo. It supp...more

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Feb 26, 2009 Bettie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adventure, fraudio, mystery-thriller, testost-tosh

Excellent audio and one enjoyable story.

Read by Alfred Molina and with a new author every chapter - how much more squeeness can the literary world chuck at me on a humpday afternoon? I'll have to have it turned up loud to cover the clacking needles.

Chapter One - by Jeffery Deaver. He conceives the characters and draws in the premise and setting.

Chapter 2 by David Hewson.

Chp 3 by James Grady.

Chp 4 by S.J. Rozan.

Chp 5 by Erica Spindler

Chp 6 by John Ransey Miller

chp 7 by David Corbett

Chp 8 John Gil...more

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Mar 04, 2011 Deb rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: suspense, audiobook

Collaborative novels aren't always the best idea...but this one does an admirable job of weaving a tale of suspense with many twists and turns.[return]The tale centers around a manuscript supposedly composed by Fredric Chopin. Former war crimes investigator Harold Middleton comes across this manuscript--and almost immediately also comes across the dead bodies of those who got in the way of the unknown assassins who are willing to kill for it. As he races from Poland to America to uncover the mys...more

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Jul 17, 2011 Rachael rated it 2 of 5 stars

This was really, really weird. Each chapter was written by a different author, the first & last chapters written by Jeffrey Deaver (whom I love)...you can really see where different authors would take the story, but because each author focuses on different pieces of the story there are a lot of dead end plot lines, a lot of characters that appear and disappear within the same chapter, or who seem key to the plot but are never visited again. To give Deaver credit, he did a really good job of...more

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Sep 21, 2012 Debra rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Why did we readers need to be exposed to this writer's game? Ooooo, I'll write the first chapter and let all my friends write a chapter and let's see where this all ends up. It ends up with way too many subplots. Maybe, it was all a joke to see if Deaver could wrap up the story and make some sense of it all. He did, but it was messy.

Where are the people at the gate in these publishing houses? I guess there are too busy working on getting their dead authors to continue writing from beyond the gr...more

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Jul 12, 2009 Charity rated it 5 of 5 stars

We used to play this game at slumber parties where one person would start a scary story and then end it where they wanted to and then the next person would pick it up at that point. That's what this book reminds me of. It was a fantastic read! You never knew where the story was going to go next. Jeffery Deaver sets the story up and and he ends it. I wonder if they all sat around a table and discussed where they thought the story should go or if they just received the previous chapters in the mai...more

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Oct 26, 2011 Nicole rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: mystery

This book, with 14 of its chapters written by 14 different authors without a predetermined plot, was an interesting attempt to do something new (newish?) and fun, but the result wasn't really up to the standards of a book worth buying. The book suffered from being 95% action and 5% character, not surprising since who wants to be the author that doesn't actually move the story forward. That wasn't the only flaw, though. Authors were not always careful in their reading of what came before, and det...more

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Sep 21, 2012 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

This book was a unique and amazing idea. I only heard about this originally through a posting on Jeffery Deaver's web site. I was so excited to see a collection of top mystery writers contribute to this story in weekly increments. Since I didn't have an audible subscription I was sadly left out. About a year later it came to CD and I was elated to get the chance to give this a read.

The plot of this serial thriller is that a Chopin manuscript is found and there is a question as to the integrity...more

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Jul 03, 2010 Linda rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I "read" this on my commute to and from Cleveland Clinic recently. It certainly made an otherwise boring trip short & exciting! I'm not a crime/thriller reader...mainly because I often can't keep straight all the characters and their subtle interrelationships. And this story has them galore! Written by 15 different thriller authors, you can imagine the twists & turns. But listening to the narration helped make it all flow and come together with more twists & turns & surprises tha...more

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Apr 29, 2010 Sandie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-books, thrillers-and-mystery, contemporary-lit

Finally had an opportunity to settle down and listen to THE CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT without interruption. The concept of having fifteen different writers collaborate on the creation of a single book is certainly an unconventional and unique undertaking. I personally would judge the results as a qualified success. There are so many twists and turns in the story, some relevant and some questionable, and so many different characters and story lines to follow (each author creates his/her own story within...more Finally had an opportunity to settle down and listen to THE CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT without interruption. The concept of having fifteen different writers collaborate on the creation of a single book is certainly an unconventional and unique undertaking. I personally would judge the results as a qualified success. There are so many twists and turns in the story, some relevant and some questionable, and so many different characters and story lines to follow (each author creates his/her own story within a story adding new individuals and taking the story in yet another direction) that one truly has to concentrate and pay attention. Some of these twists are relevant and exciting, adding to the development of the total picture while others appear wander aimlessly not contributing much to the main storyline but instead painting their own little cartoon drawing in the corner of the canvas.

Chapter one introduces us to Harold Middleton, a former war crimes investigator who has come into possession of a previously undiscovered musical manuscript by Frederic Chopin (which may or may not be authentic). From there we are led from Poland to the USA, joining the protagonist as he threads his way through a maze of murders and narrow escapes, pursued and targeted by assassins and federal agents, reconnecting with members of his old investigative team, unraveling secret codes, and ultimately confronting his nemesis and past adversary, a threatening presence named Faust.

Alfred Molina's presentation was magnificent and added just the right inflection and tone to the tale while Jeffery Deaver did a job that was nothing short of miraculous in tying together all the divergent threads and bringing the story to a believable and thundering conclusion. My recommendation: Save this offering for a road trip where you can devote six hours of uninterrupted listening. It will definitely make the story more cohesive in your mind and you will be so busy listening that the miles will just fly by.
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Nov 26, 2007 Grumpus rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: audiobook, fiction

Listened to the audio download from [www.audible.com].

Narrated by: Alfred Molina

I loved the concept of this for "audio only" book that was developed by Audible.com. There were 15 writers each writing a chapter without knowing how the project will end. Jeffrey Deaver wrote the first chapter to start it off as well as the last two to bring it all together. I was very pleased the way all the details were wrapped up in a cogent manner. I have to admit, based on this one chapter per author concept, I...more

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Jun 16, 2009 أشرف فقيه rated it 4 of 5 stars

توصية من فاضل التركي. رواية بقلم ١٥ مؤلفاً. تجربة باهرة في التواصل بين 15 عقلا إبداعياً لإكمال حبكة بوليسية بدأها أحدهم ليستلمها الآخر وهكذا حتى وصلت لمؤلف الفصل الأول الذي وجد نفسه مطالباً بإنهاء قصة أكملها 14 كاتباًغيره بـ 14 أسلوباً مختلفاً!

استمتعت للنسخة الصوتية من الرواية. متعة حقيقية.

أنا مدين لك يا فاضل :)

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Nov 29, 2010 Michelle O'flynn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Really probably should just give a 4 or 4.5 star rating, but what the heck, I devoured this book. This is a unique creation, with the first and final two chapters written by Jeffrey Deaver, and every other by another author. A great collaboration, that was woven seamlessly even though each chapter is written by a different expert in the thriller genre. I can't wait to read the next joint effort from the International Thriller Writers.

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Mar 08, 2009 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

This audiobook was written by 15 different thriller writers, most of whom any thriller reader has probably read. Jeffrey Deaver set the stage with the first chapter and then passed it on to the next author and so on and so on. Deaver knew he would be writing the final chapters as well. So, even though he may have had an idea where he wanted the story to go, any of the intervening authors could completely throw the plot off track, or kill off a vital character. It was also written specifically fo...more

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Apr 19, 2011 Dot rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a thriller conceived by Jeffrey Deaver who wrote the first and last chapters, but each of the intervening chapters is written by a different mystery writer. The story progresses seamlessly in spite of having 14 different authors and follows a complicated plot based on a code hidden in music manuscripts.
Rather too many bloody deaths and torture for me, but overall more successful as a book than one might expect.

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Jul 12, 2011 Barbara Fillip rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is written by a multitude of authors, each covering one chapter. I would have expected more discontinuity in styles, but I found it quite enjoyable to listen to -- with a constant narrator's voice. The impact of having a multitude of authors was most obvious in terms of providing for more unexpected turns. A secondary character in an early chapter suddenly becomes critical to the plot later on.

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Sep 22, 2010 Kim rated it 1 of 5 stars

It seemed rather disjointed. I now wish I hadn't know that the chapters were written by different people because now I'm not sure if I could have enjoyed it more if I thought it was 1 author?? Throughout the whole story I kept wondering which author was going to move the thing forward and it almost seemed like Deaver's had to pull it all together in his last 2 chapters. Just not very satifying overall

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Feb 07, 2011 KDawn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: listened-to

I absolutely and thoroughly enjoyed this. If you liked The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown...you'll like this. And the idea of passing a story between readers is just fantastic. It was interesting and had good twists and turns. It was easy to see which authors prefer to focus on how people are "feeling" about something as opposed to focusing on what is actually happening. It also provided and insight to some authors I may not have considered otherwise and will definitely look for. HIGHLY recommend!

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Nov 13, 2011 Renee rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: any thriller lovers

I was initially intrigued by the experimental nature of this work, written in serial style by a battery of thriller writers and specifically designed as an audio book. As stories go, this is a creative one, with many twists and turns and a fast-paced plot. It was wonderful on audio book, especially so because of the musical interludes that are built in at the beginning and end of each chapter. Narrator Alfred Molina's rich voice is an added treat.

I had expected that the differences between the w...more

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Apr 21, 2010 Jill rated it 2 of 5 stars

I generally like this kind of book. Although I like the fact that different authors wrote different chapters, there were too many characters and too many red herrings. It was hard to figure out who was who and on whose side everyone was on. Parts were so unbelievable in terms of character development. After a while, I just didn't care. I would NOT recommend this book.

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Dec 08, 2009 Leesa rated it 5 of 5 stars

I picked up this audiobook while searching for PJ Parrish's work, whose Louis Kinkaid/Joe Fry books I love.

I loved this story and the format (14 authors contributing one chapter, with Jeffery Deaver contributing the first and last two chapters). Alfred Molina did a fabulous job narrating, complete with believable accents.

I'm looking forward to the next in this series.

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Feb 25, 2009 Steven rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Mar 07, 2010 Brian Sison rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: crime-mystery, fiction, suspense-thriller

This is a good-enough story, considering its disjointed nature. Despite the good intent, a novel written by 16 separate authors was destined to be sub-par. Each author brings their own distinct style to their respective chapters; to me, this just seemed distracting.

The story line was intriguing, and there were enough twists to keep the reader engaged. International war crime investigator, turned music curator, turned music professor, turned international spy. As usual, the reader needs to suspen...more

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Feb 16, 2011 Leontien rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

A piece of classical music that is worth killing for? Hidden messages about chemical weapons?

Even though I'm not a classical music fan, or know anything about music, I liked this book. Every chapter is written by someone else, which means some chapters took me a page or two to get into, but in the end, this is a story filled with (unexpected) twists and turns. I can totally recommend it to anyone who loves crime novels.

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About Jeffery Deaver

Jeffery Deaver was born outside of Chicago in 1950. His father was an advertising copywriter and his mother was a homemaker. Deaver worked as a magazine writer, then, to gain the background needed to become a legal correspondent for The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, he enrolled at Fordham Law School. In 1990 he started to write full time. Deaver has been nominated for six Edgar Awards fro...more

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