Glen Larum's first novel, Waltz Against the Sky, explores the fates awaiting four young men who leave home behind for various reasons and venture out into the world. Evan Blaine, an out-of-work newspaper editor who has fumbled through this more than once before, finds himself seizing another chance; Dink Downs, who has lost his first regular job on a Florida road crew, gets swept along by his older brother, Del, an ex-con who has agreed to drive across country to deliver an automobile for a former cellmate; and teen-ager Tony Angione is hitch-hiking from New Jersey to California to see if he can find himself, employment, and a future with an uncle who may be more myth than the building contractor who can answer his prayers. The paths of these four - Blaine, the Downs brothers, and Angione - are all destined to converge in West Texas, where they bump up against the people whom strangers are most likely to encounter in a strange place, and regional law enforcement officials like Sheriff Leo Blunt and his deputies, who are used to administering justice in their own way. As Waltz begins, Sheriff Blunt's world is turned upside down by an uncommon crime, a breakout from an unlocked jail and events spiral out of control from that moment. A flashback layering technique featuring varying viewpoints carries the reader along as the characters reach their appointments with destiny. While many of the encounters with the ordinary population, particularly Blaine's and Angione's, seem to affirm a basic goodness in people, there is an underlying tension that plays out to an unexpected end. Told in a laconic western voice, the story uses distinctive narrative variation to weave different perspectives of past and present into plainsong about ordinary people dancing with fate, yet rarely recognizing their partner. The novel makes a powerful case that while randomness calls the tune in life, it is the moral ambiguity of people in power that provides the background sheet music. The only question is, will anyone waltz away?

Once again Axel Crochet, bearded musicologist-at-large, stumbles into murderous intrigue amid church politics and academic amphigory, where tempers run so high because the stakes are so low. In Cats Paw, Axel is convinced by a colleague at Pittsburghs Monongahela University to investigate the sudden death of the university organist, putting both his academic position and his life in jeopardy. In The Carcassonne Codex, Axel attends a professional meeting in Minneapolis. He soon finds himself thrust in the middle of a murderous plot after he is handed a pill bottle by a hotel housemaid and becomes suspicious about the death of a noted medievalist. In If Thine Eye Offend Thee, Axel begins a new position as music director at a wealthy church where abuses by the rector have alienated the congregation and evoked calls for his removal. Axel encounters a warm welcome from the choir, but hostility from the sinister senior warden. In this trilogy of murder mysteries, a curious musicologist with a propensity for attracting mayhem must overcome professional jealousies, evil plots and bizarre chains of events.

Federal Judge Patrick O'Shea is found swinging from his courtroom chandelier clad only in his robe. Everyone wanted him dead. FBI task force officer Katie O'Connor and her teamwork with the FBI and others to untangle the ever-growing lists of suspects including his estranged wife and judicial colleague. Small town attorney and former federal law clerk, Buck Davis, helps the court by identifying vengeful litigants and overseeing the law clerks during the turbulent time. Davis juggles his small town law practice with his budding romance with Katie, and rebuilding his relationship with his opioid addicted brother.

At the beginning of the 19th century the waltz brought men and women face-to-face, dancing tightly embraced and staring into each other's eyes, a position that provoked a great deal of anxiety in many circles: bishops of Austria signed decrees against waltzing, France banned it at court, and even Leo XII sought to suppress the waltz by papal decree. Nevertheless, composers wrote waltzes for the ballrooms, and the new bourgeoisie of Europe enjoyed the freedom and informality of the dance.The reception of the waltz as music was informed by 19th-century views on women. As a result, the waltz - both dance and music - acquired a distinctly gendered meaning. In Verdi's La Traviata, Puccini's La Bohème, and Berg's Wozzeck, the composers relied on the waltz's contradictory meanings of individual pleasure and social disapprobation to portray the women characters and their roles in the development of the plot.The popularity of the waltz persisted beyond the original era of the Viennese waltz. Twentieth-century composers wrote waltzes either to pay homage to the Viennese waltz and its creators or to evoke the spirit of that earlier period. In compositions such as La Valse and Wozzeck, Ravel and Berg make deliberate references to the Viennese waltz without yielding their own musical language to its convention.