Nancy Taber’s A Sea of Spectres

I tend to steer clear of paranormal mysteries. There’s a whole sub-genre of crime fiction that involves ghosts, psychic phenomena, astrology, or witches. And I love a good ghost story. Rebecca thrills me, and Vertigo is brilliant. But in these instances, the gothic shadings turn out to have very concrete origins. Not so in paranormal fiction.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up A Sea of Spectres, a first novel by a Brock U. professor and former Canadian military officer. It received a strong endorsement in the Globe & Mail, in April, by the venerable Margaret Cannon. As Cannon notes, this is an unusual instance of crime fiction because the crime that’s featured is “incidental to the story of three different women in three different times.”

However, it is definitely a mystery novel. The present-day protagonist, Raina, is a detective who has inherited a matrilineal tradition of special powers. She’s struggling to come to terms with a dramatic event in her own life and with her connection to generations of women before her, whose gifts were more frequently feared than appreciated.

Raina had a youthful encounter with a ghost ship and she’s haunted by the spell cast on her, luring her to the water. Since her family runs a tourism business taking visitors out on a boat to hear tales of the ghost ship, Raina has fled her home and community, taking refuge in work that keeps her away from the shoreline. Now the disappearance of a young woman, Simone, brings her back to her family in search of answers. The narrative is a complicated one, with two timelines in the past and multiple documents/diaries/newspaper articles that become part of the plot.

Given that complexity, Taber handles the story deftly, and the novel is extensively researched. The historical details are inserted appropriately; the author is not determined to tell you everything she gleaned about Prince Edward Island, the novel’s setting, or the Acadian expulsion, a key bit of background. There are fun asides about–for instance–the Island’s interest in joining other provinces to create the Dominion of Canada, or the jostling of the Fathers of Confederation for placement in a photo.

A Sea of Spectres is published by a P.E.I. press that’s new to me, Acorn Press, but I notice that their list of authors includes cozy writer Hilary MacLeod. She has composed a jokey series of Island-set novels, although I’ve only read All Is Clam. MacLeod is also the author of Cod Only Knows, Mind Over Mussels, Something Fishy . . . you get the idea.

I still have qualms about the genre overall, with the caveat that the dreamy and haunting novels of Carol Goodman (Lake of Dead Languages!) are among my favourites. Ghosts work better for me than, say, psychic visions. Here’s an intriguing explanation by writer C.J. Cooke for why some of us are skeptics about paranormal mystery fiction, and why we should keep open minds:

“. . . a thriller and/or mystery story depends on the writer achieving rock-solid suspension of disbelief, but the second you begin hinting at ghostly goings on, or perhaps the existence of fairies, you essentially tear down the world you’ve constructed for your trusting readers and ask them to step into a new, less certain one. But sometimes, it works. And sometimes a writer manages to do something that’s so wildly imaginative and wholly believable that it seeps into your subconscious and hooks into a primal stratum of fear.”

Taber’s book doesn’t evoke this kind of terror because that’s not her purpose. She provides an insightful and evocative depiction of women in male-dominated contexts, negotiating abilities that they cannot fully understand or explain. This is a rewarding first novel and, I hope, the beginning of a series.