This chilling novel set in post–World War I London, traverses the strange and often frightening intersection between Spiritualism and early psychiatry, featuring a murderous psychiatrist named Dr. Bernard Gussmann, whose occult experiments include a dark practice he dubs “subgnostic possession.” Spiritualists of the day included the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who here has an opportunity to legitimize his unusual beliefs when he receives what seems to be a letter from the supposedly long-dead doctor extending an offer Doyle cannot refuse: communing with the deceased in exchange for a small favor. Doyle must bring any one of three people named in the letter to visit a woman in prison awaiting execution for murder. Each is a former patient of Gussmann’s. Is the letter a hoax? Is Dr. Gussmann really somehow still alive? Doyle seeks help from his American journalist friend, Charles Baker, who teams up with Adrianna Wallace, wife of a prominent Member of Parliament. As the trio uncover the backgrounds of the three people listed in the letter and follow the ethereal track of Gussmann, they soon learn that they are accomplices to a deadly game of musical chairs.
I'm an Arizona native whose roots go back to colonial Virginia, where my ancestors taught at the College of William and Mary before the American Revolution (they fought for the Americans). Now my wife Jená and I live and write on the North Coast of California.
I come to fiction writing from a varied background. Trained at various times as a carpenter, a soldier, a musician, a teacher, and a writer, I bring a little each to my novels. One Native-American and two European languages add to the mix. Undergraduate majors in English and social studies, a graduate degree in linguistics, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing further shape my writing.
I taught school for a decade in the Arizona canyon lands, where modern life collides uneasily with mysterious geography and the alternate world perceptions of very diverse cultures. There I learned that differing beliefs construct differing realities--just as disbelief fabricates impossibility. Thus one person's disbelief makes another person's reality seem impossible. The characters in my stories are constantly relearning this truth as they collide with other lives.
Real history leaves many unsolved mysteries among the unusual acts of famous historical figures as it fails to explain why they did the things they did. Historians make guesses about that-usually safe and conventional guesses.
I'm a novelist, not a historian, so I like to make bolder guesses-offer reasons that violate the expected. My characters try to find safe explanations but stumble instead onto more frightening alternatives. The known history is accurate, but the remaining mysteries are fair game for my fiction.
