The Haunted Martyr
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The expat author travels to Italy, where communing with the dead can lead to murder, in this historical mystery by the author of The Second Woman.
England in the chilly winter of 1902 is captive to a new craze: Mediums and psychics are springing up like toadstools after a rainstorm, and the public is rushing to consult them, thirsty for intimations of the Great Beyond. It's no surprise that a man like Denton has his doubts: An American Yankee in King Edward's city, he is a walking representative of the "Show Me" state.
Nevertheless, Denton agreed to write a book about ghosts and hauntings, and has taken himself to Italy to do it. Napoli may be bella, but it offers Denton only boredom and frustration, until a dead body shows up to make life interesting. As he tries to divine the killer's identity, the cold hard clues give him a new angle on his new spiritualist friends.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1902, Cameron's workmanlike fourth Denton mystery (after 2014's The Second Woman) takes Denton, a former Civil War general who's now a successful novelist living in London, to Naples, Italy, along with his aloof lover, Janet Striker. Denton hopes Janet will recover from a bout with typhus while he researches a book on the city's "spooks and spirits." He receives visits from several eccentric characters, including an odiferous monk with an upper-class English accent, who claims he's being haunted; a wily con man who offers Denton the chance to stay in a haunted palazzo; and a local policeman who hints that Denton should kill a couple of Neapolitan gangsters. The stakes rise when Denton discovers a dead man lying on some palazzo steps with his genitals cut off. When the victim proves to be English, Denton returns to London, where he indulges in some gun-toting derring-do. The narrative wobbles between the hero's slightly off-the-rails sleuthing and his perplexing relationship with his lover. The lack of period details, meanwhile, means the action could be taking place anytime within a span of decades. This is one of the lesser entries in this series.
