The walking skeleton Picka Bones has led a fairly dull unlife until he meets a trio of musical pets and a heartsick princess, just as a plague of increasingly dreadful puns starts spreading across Xanth. Only his own gift for music turns out to be strong enough to stop the monster behind it. The thirty-fifth Xanth novel, its title punning on Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, gives its skeleton character a genuinely tender arc.
Summary by Loreful, from public sources