John MacLachlan Gray White Stone Day

White Stone Day

John MacLachlan Gray

St. Martin's, Oct 2005, $24.95 288 pp.

ISBN 0312282936

In late 1850's London, at the bequest of the Pinkerton Group, Falcon reporter Edmund Whitty goes undercover to expose psychic Dr. Gilbert Williams as a fake. Instead, shockingly his brother David seemingly contacts him from the other side during a s ance. David had been a highly regarded scholar at Oxford who drowned during a rowing race years earlier.

At about the same time at Crouch Manor in Oxfordshire, Reverend William Leffington Boltbyn loves to photograph young girls; presently he is shooting two sisters Emma and Lydia, daughters of the indifferent Revered Lambert, who either does not care what happens to his children or is unaware of the threat his religious peer poses to them. From the seance, Whitty begins to track his brother's final days. Whitty becomes aware of the perilous situation when he obtains a photograph of David in a compromising position with someone who looks like Emma. That soon leads the reporter to Oxfordshire, and fears that a wolf in sheep's clothing is using the pulpit to hide being a paedophile, but to prove this could expose what he thinks happened to darken the soul of his beloved late brother.

WHITE STONE DAY, the sequel to the spellbinding THE FIEND IN HUMAN, is a terrific Victorian investigative tale. The delightful protagonist wonders if he really heard David from beyond the grave (of course Edmund did not have the Amazing Randi to debunk the psychic). Though he may besmirch his sibling's name, and he is losing his courage with every step into the dark he takes, Whitty tries to keep the Lambert siblings safe from a person he believes is a human devil. Great historical mystery.

Harriet Klausner