Playing piano is a dangerous life!

In Descending Thirds, Nicole Conn turns the rarefied world of classical music into a battlefield of genius, obsession, desire, and fate—where every performance can make a career, destroy a soul, or expose the one truth no one was meant to hear.

Forty prodigies arrive at the 1965 International Ketterling Competition with everything to prove. Only a handful will survive the cut. For Alexandra Von Triessen, the piano has always been both refuge and weapon. But when she crosses paths with the magnetic Sebastian D’Antonio—and later, his enigmatic brother Conrad—music becomes something far more dangerous than ambition.

It becomes destiny.

Descending Thirds is an epic literary romance about genius, fate, music, and the artists who sacrifice everything to be heard.