Ghosts of Gotham

Lionel Page is a reporter who makes his living being the most rational man in the room. He finds the wire behind the levitating table, the confederate in the audience, the trick in the trick — and he has never once been surprised. It is not scepticism so much as insulation, and it has held for a long time.

Then Regina Dunkle sends for him. She is ancient, enormously wealthy, and unnervingly well briefed on a childhood Lionel has spent his adult life outrunning. Her commission is simple enough on paper: a lost manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe has surfaced in New York's literary underworld, and she wants to know whether it is real. Her terms are less simple. Do this, and what she knows about him stays where it is.

The manuscript turns out to be the kind of object that people die around.

Lionel's search takes him through rare-book dealers, private collections and the parts of the city's history that never made it into the guidebooks, and puts him in the path of Madison Hannah — a woman who seems to have been waiting for him, and who guides him into a New York with older rules than the ones he has been debunking.

The further he follows the trail, the harder it becomes to maintain that he is investigating a story rather than standing in the middle of one.

Ghosts of Gotham is the first book of Craig Schaefer's Ghosts of Gotham Saga, an urban fantasy built on Poe, secret histories and the professional sceptic's oldest problem: what happens when the thing you have spent your life explaining away turns around and recognises you.