In 1937, a live jazz broadcast from the Grandview Hotel runs four minutes past its allotted network slot. Decades later, archivist Elias Venn discovers that the network log did not merely record the overrun-it recorded why it happened. What sounds like bureaucratic shorthand becomes a map of movement through a ballroom, a service corridor, and a murder that listeners unknowingly heard around the edges of the music.
As Elias works with pianist Mara Holt, trumpeter Jonah Vale, attorney Celia Rusk, and retired engineer Arthur Bell, the old recording becomes newly dangerous. A hidden affair and a fight over the recording's ownership complicate every account, while the four extra minutes force the investigators to decide whether history is what happened, what was broadcast, or what somebody managed to write in the log before anyone asked the right question.
