For fans of C. S. Harris comes Laura Joh Rowland's fifth Victorian
mystery where Sarah must confront her own ghosts--and face her most
elusive and deadly adversary yet.
Victorian London is a city gripped by belief in the supernatural--but a
grisly murder becomes a matter of flesh and blood for intrepid
photographer Sarah Bain.
London, October 1890. Crime scene photographer Sarah Bain is
overjoyed to marry her beloved Detective Sergeant Barrett--but the
wedding takes a sinister turn when the body of a stabbing victim is
discovered in the crypt of the church. Not every newlywed couple begins
their marriage with a murder investigation, but Sarah and Barrett, along
with their friends Lord Hugh Staunton and Mick O'Reilly, take the case.
The dead man is Charles Firth, whose profession is spirit photography--
photographing the ghosts of the deceased. When Sarah develops the
photographs he took in the church, she discovers one with a pale,
blurred figure attacking the victim. The city's spiritualist community
believes the church is haunted and the figure is a ghost. But Sarah is a
skeptic, and she and her friends soon learn that the victim had plenty
of enemies in the human world--including a scientist who studies
supernatural phenomena, his psychic daughter, and an heiress on a
campaign to debunk spiritualism and expose fraudulent mediums.
In the tunnels beneath a demolished jail, a ghost-hunting expedition
ends with a new murder, and new suspects. While Sarah searches for the
truth about both crimes, she travels a dark, twisted path into her own
family's sordid history. Her long lost father is the prime suspect in a
cold-case murder, and her reunion with him proves that even the most
determined skeptic can be haunted by ghosts from the past.
