The Haunted Martyr

The fourth volume in the darkly brilliant historical crime series featuring American author-sleuth Denton in 1900s London. The HAUNTED MARTYR plunges the American novelist Denton into the world of turn-of-the-century spiritualism, most of which is sham but which includes some very real death. It is the winter of 1902 to 1903. Denton has brought his lover, Janet Stryker, to Naples, Italy, to recover from a near-fatal attack of typhus. Denton is using the advance from a book to pay his expenses: the book centres on spiritualism and the supernatural in Naples. (Several seances are with Eusapia Paladino, a real historical figure and object of study by England's Society for Psychical Research.) Denton intends to write a light travel book on spiritualists, ghosts, legends and horrors, and on Naples itself. But when he tries to rent a newly renovated palazzo and is told by the agent that he can rent it for free if he dares first spend a night there, he knows the place must be haunted. He and Janet duly see an apparition of a tall, long-armed woman, an apparition which leads inevitably to the discovery of a real body, to the story of an eccentric English peer with a terrible secret and the involvement of the Camorra - the Neapolitan mafia.