SPECTRAL EVIDENCE MYSTERIES • BOOK 3

Séance in Silhouette

By Lucian Haverly

A gas-lit séance. A candle-maker who believes in ghosts. A skeptical doctor who is about to discover that some shadows cannot be explained away.

Marcel Fournier is dead—collapsed across a séance table in a Paris townhouse, his hand outstretched toward something no one else could see. The official verdict is cardiac failure. But Étienne Duval, candle-maker and the man who loved Marcel in the only way their world permitted—in silence, in secret—knows the truth is darker. He has been waiting since dawn on a hard Prefecture bench, clutching a paper silhouette cut by his dead lover's hands, refusing to leave until someone listens.

Dr. Alistair Finch does not believe in ghosts. He believes in evidence, differential diagnoses, and the satisfying collapse of superstition beneath rational scrutiny. He has spent fifteen years debunking fraudulent mediums across Europe. The grief-mad candle-maker in the waiting room is precisely the kind of hysteric he has no patience for. Yet something in the morgue—petechiae that shouldn't exist, bruising that doesn't fit—cracks the clean surface of his certainty, and Alistair finds himself doing the one thing his pride forbids: admitting he might be wrong.

What begins as reluctant investigation pulls them into a labyrinth of blackmail, ritual murder, and a secret society wielding occult terror as a political weapon. As bodies accumulate and the list of intended victims narrows toward Étienne's own name, the two men are forced into an intimacy neither anticipated—one carrying too much faith, the other too little, each discovering that the other holds exactly what they are missing.

But the conspiracy is older and more powerful than either suspects. And when the truth finally emerges from the shadows, the price of stopping it may be higher than science, certainty, or grief alone can pay.

A slow-burn enemies-to-lovers historical MM romance featuring occult conspiracy, Victorian Paris, and two men who must choose between being right and being saved.