SPECTRAL EVIDENCE MYSTERIES • BOOK 2

The Phantom’s Protégé

By Lucian Haverly

A murder in the rafters. A phantom hidden in the score.

Detective Carlos “CJ” Marquez arrives at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Opera House expecting a difficult case, not a ghost story. Composer Daniel Laurent has been crushed by sabotaged stage rigging during rehearsal, and the evidence points to murder disguised as accident. Damaged machinery, careful timing, and insider knowledge all suggest someone turned the theatre itself into a weapon.

Adrian Yu saw more than broken rigging and blood beneath the lights. A violinist, Daniel’s protégé, and the man most shaken by his death, Adrian insists a figure in an old-fashioned tailcoat was watching from the fly gallery moments before the fatal drop. To CJ, it sounds like grief and shock. To Adrian, it feels like the opera house is trying to speak through music, memory, and the shadows it has kept for decades.

As CJ and Adrian follow clues hidden in a coded score, vanished costumes, private boxes, access logs, and forgotten archives, the investigation pulls them deeper into the opera house’s polished lies. Every rehearsal, every corridor, and every echo seems to carry another warning. The closer they come to the truth, the more dangerous the case becomes, and the harder it is to ignore the charged connection growing between them.

CJ trusts evidence. Adrian trusts what the dead may have left behind. Between them lies a killer bold enough to stage murder beneath the lights, and a theatre full of secrets waiting for its final performance. If they cannot separate legend from motive in time, the next act may be written in blood.

The Phantom’s Protégé is an atmospheric MM romantic suspense mystery, pairing a skeptical homicide detective and a grieving violinist in a haunted San Francisco opera house filled with coded music, backstage secrets, slow-burn tension, and ghostly theatrical danger.