The Spirit Photographer's Lie
A Victorian Gothic Mystery

About this book:

London, 1860. Silas Thorne is a master of light and chemistry, a spirit photographer who sells grieving widows the impossible: a portrait of their beloved dead, standing silently beside them. He knows every trick—the pre-exposed plates, the double exposures, the careful choreography of ether and silver nitrate. The lens has no soul, he tells himself; he merely sells solace at three guineas a print. Then Lady Clara Vane climbs the stairs to his Oxford Street studio, lifts her veil, and whispers that her husband isn't haunting a photograph. He's standing right behind Silas's chair.

What begins as another careful fraud unravels into something the camera cannot explain. The wet-plate process demands precision—seconds counted in a red-lit darkroom, collodion drying on glass, the unforgiving chemistry of silver and salt—but the entity now threading through Silas's studio obeys no formula. As the fog presses against the skylight and the city's dead press closer, the line between artifice and apparition dissolves. The charlatan must become an investigator, because the next image developing in his trough may not be a trick at all. And if the lens truly does not lie, then Silas Thorne has finally captured something that should not exist.

Atmospheric, historically rich, and taut with dread, *The Spirit Photographer's Lie* blends Victorian gothic horror with a mystery that develops like a latent image—slowly, inexorably, until the final exposure reveals a truth no one wanted to see.