Book Review: "The Spiritualist" by Megan Chance

By Carlotta G. Holton

Those who love the Victorian era are in for a treat with Chance’s erotic murder-mystery tale set in New York City, circa 1857. Murder and mayhem, spiritualism and the supernatural combine to create an armchair thriller. Amidst the atmosphere of gaslit streets, roiling fog and the rapping at the weekly séance table, her heroine evolves from her repressed status, common for her gender of the times, into a woman of action and passion.

The daughter of a detective and a mother with secrets, Evelyn has risen into Knickerbocker society by marrying the wealthy attorney, Peter Asherton. She is included in the balls and soirees of the upper ten thousand who comprise society’s crème de la crème. Yet she is lonely due to her husband’s unexplained absence every night. “I buried my loneliness in night after night of glittering New York society.” But society dictates the woman’s role of acceptance. When she confides in a friend, she is told, “don’t go wanting things you can’t have.”

With her husband’s admission that he attends séances, she is invited to join him at the home of wealthy society matron, Dorothy Benton, in hopes of contacting her husband’s late mother. She encounters the mysterious and seductive Michel Jourdain, the medium who channels not only the spirits of the afterworld, but the affections of many women as well. Is he a charlatan or the real deal? The evening is interrupted by gun fire and the die is cast for an unexpected chain of events.

Peter leaves her at home that evening to investigate and doesn’t return. When his body is found floating in the East River, the façade of her relatives is quickly shattered and their true characters revealed when it is learned that she inherits the family fortune. The author does a good job of showing the differences between social classes as the world of snobbery and cliques is threatened by and in turn threatens those who stand in their way. The days when she thought she would “be an Asherton forever” come crashing to an end when at her arraignment she realizes that “Peter’s family means to see me hang.”

Charged with her husband’s murder, dislodged from the family home, an outcast by his family and the society into which she married, she finds refuge in Benton’s mansion. At times the plot pulses with a steamy sexual undercurrent as Evelyn discovers not only a latent talent for spiritualism, but begins to acknowledge an awakening of her own long-suppressed physical and emotional desires.

Betrayal comes from all sides, save for her husband’s partner, Ben Rampling, who takes on her case. Using her position in the house they scheme to force out the identity of the killer. The compelling characters of Evelyn, Michel and Ben propel this novel into a quick and intriguing read. The author skillfully weaves Evelyn’s transformation from her earlier belief that “The uncertainty of living as a woman without prospects, without money was terrifying. To always be alone, to know that despair might lead one to a life of degradation and shame, where each day one only wished for the strength to end it.”

With each ghost she encounters from her family’s past and present, and with each spirit writing that comes through her from beyond, she grows closer to uncovering the truth about her husband and his murderer. A surprising twist sheds light on Evelyn’s marriage and helps empower her to become the woman she was meant to be.