SPECTRAL EVIDENCE MYSTERIES • BOOK 2
The Phantom’s Protégé
By Lucian Haverly
A killer hides behind a century of silence—and the only way to find him is to trust a man who speaks a language you've never learned to hear.
Detective Carlos "CJ" Marquez has spent twenty years building cases the only way he trusts: evidence photographed, cataloged, and filed. Intuition is a liability. Feelings are noise. When a counterweight crashes onto the stage of San Francisco's Golden Gate Opera House—killing the city's most celebrated pianist mid-rehearsal—CJ is certain the answer lies in brake mechanisms and access logs, not the ghost-light shadows flickering above a crime scene that everyone else wants to call an accident.
Violinist Adrian Yu was in the wings when his mentor died. He saw a figure in the fly gallery—old-fashioned coat, vanishing like smoke—and he has a theory no detective will take seriously: the music itself is a message. When CJ reluctantly partners with the grieving, brilliant, quietly determined Adrian, he expects interference. What he doesn't expect is the terrifying possibility that the man reading meaning into musical notation might be right.
As sabotaged rigging, arson-scorched archives, and a century-old embezzlement scheme pull them deeper into the opera house's gilded, gaslit secrets, each new attempt on their lives confirms that someone powerful needs the truth buried permanently. The deeper they dig—through locked boxes, phantom tailcoats, and coded acrostics hidden in a dead man's final score—the more CJ realizes that solving this case requires learning to trust evidence he cannot photograph.
Working side by side through danger, grief, and hard-won revelation, CJ and Adrian forge something neither man anticipated: a partnership built on complementary truths. But conspiracies don't stay buried without casualties, and caring about someone means having something left to lose. When the final performance begins, the real question isn't who killed Daniel Laurent—it's whether two men who see the world so differently can build something that survives what's coming.
A slow-burn, forced-proximity MM romance thriller featuring coded scores, Gothic atmosphere, and a detective who must learn that some evidence only musicians can read.
