“The Musician’s Daughter”: The Emerging Mythos of an Assassin

Bucharest, Romania Skyline by Michael Tompsett

In one week (March 21st, 2022), Brownsville, Texas based Indie author Ryan McGinnis is releasing a new novel, The Osiris Initiative, in the Xavier Greene assassin-spy series. In the interim, he has made available a short work in the same universe entitled “The Musician’s Daughter: A Xavier Greene Thriller.” which delves deeper into the history of its titular character and ought to increase excitement for the new novel as well. The Boron Heist has previously reviewed a few of McGinnis’s short works (“Sketch” and “A Good Night’s Sleep”) as well as his first novel Tears of the Dragon, so you know we’re fans. His new story can be accessed for free by joining McGinnis’s email list here and if you read it to end, you’ll even find a nice blurb on Tears from yours truly.

In “The Musician’s Daughter,” the setting is Bucharest, Romania where Xavier Greene has been stationed to bring a politician, Andrei Luca, to justice for his backroom dealings with the Romanian Humanist Party, a political organization described as a thinly-veiled front for the proliferation of specialized radios called Music-Boxes. The purpose of the device is not discussed in full and one is compelled to call it a MacGuffin, or physical object that propels the narrative forward and provides it a visual center. While the place, and indeed the purpose of Xavier’s mission, are explained, the time is left open and the reader is therefore uncertain whether the events of the narrative unfold before or after those of Tears of the Dragon. What we do know is that Xavier mentions his rise to top-level assassin status in the Citadel, a secret organization that hires out spies and other professionals for high profile missions, possibly with nefarious intentions. By the end of McGinnis’s first novel, however, Xavier’s relationship to the Citadel is anything, if not tenuous, and therefore the reader might assume that this story is a prequel.

As in most good prequels and shorter works in a larger corpus or universe, this tale introduces more backstory to the protagonist. Namely, we learn that Xavier’s line of work is an attempt–perhaps unconsciously–to follow in the footsteps of his deceased father. Further, the reader learns that if Xavier is to follow his father’s example, that his work may inevitably lead to his death as well. The sins of the father… even the absent and long-dead father, eh?

Xavier’s mission to bring the politician to justice and to claim the Music-Box device for his employers starts off smoothly and in a way that demonstrates Xavier’s professional ethics. When the second half of the mission involves extracting the device from a nonchalant, professional spy, Mihail Vulpe, Xavier exceeds the boundaries of the job, rendering it a kill-order operation. As Mihail’s organization closes in on Xavier, will he be able to escape with his life, with the device in tow, and without killing an innocent bystander–Mihail’s orphaned daughter Ana? In “The Musician’s Daughter,” McGinnis has produced a kinetic piece of short, action writing with moments of deeper reflection on fate and the ways in which history recurs, in which our lives play out eternal conflicts that might, or might not, preclude our ability to choose our direction in this world.