Score!

Sir Roberto Rannaldini, the most successful but detested conductor in the world, had two ambitions: to seduce his ravishing nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, Tabitha CampbellBlack, and to put his mark on musical history by making the definitive film of Verdi's darkest opera, Don Carlos.

To achieve the latter, he enlists the help of his charismatic French godson, Tristan de Montigny, the hottest director in Europe, who is capable of coaxing magical performances out of the most wayward and wooden prima donnas.

As Rannaldini, Tristan and the entire cast, headed by Rannaldini's capricious mistress, Hermione Harefield, demand total artistic control, the recording is stormy. But nothing compares to the ructions that occur when filming begins in Rannaldini's heavily haunted fourteenth-century abbey.

To disgruntled spooks, temperamental singers and histrionic set designers is added a glamorous but bolshy French film crew determined to pull everything in sight, particularly the tempestuous Tabitha, now employed as Mistress of the Horse.

All the women - and several of the men - are determined to pull Tristan. To their disappointment, he is interested only in keeping the movie on track. But as he battles to boost the morale Rannaldini is hell bent on destroying, Tristan finds himself increasingly drawn to Tabitha - which Rannaldini will not tolerate.

Then the news leaks out that Rannaldini is writing his memoirs, revealing dreadful secrets about everyone, and his fate is sealed.

But as Rutshire CID and the world's press pour in, doubts grow that Rannaldini is really dead. Or is it his ghost stalking the abbey cloisters in outrage that his arch-enemy, the tone-deaf Rupert Campbell-Black, has taken over as executive producer?

Terrifyingly creepy, by turns wildly funny and unashamedly romantic, Score! is Jilly Cooper's most thrilling novel to date. But it is also a story, like Don Carlos, about loneliness in high places, and heroism and passionate love triumphing against the odds.