They called her “Lady Stewart” when she was married to a British aristocrat. They called her “Miss Cora “when she ran a brothel in Florida. But she called herself “Mrs. Crane” when she asked Sherlock Holmes to locate her common-law husband, writer Stephen Crane, who’d gone missing in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In their attempt to fulfil the lady’s request, Holmes and Watson encounter a world of celebrity authors, terrorist bombings, and haunted manor houses. But it is only when Stephen Crane falls victim to a notorious blackmailer that the master detective and his partner find themselves face-to-face with cold-blooded murder. Under darkened skies, a solitary apparition stood brightly illuminated on the ship’s gloomy deck. Or so it seemed. Cloaked in a long white raincoat-the same gleaming duster he’d worn in the face of Spanish gunfire at San Juan Heights-Stephen Crane looked for all the world like the ghost so many people thought he’d already become.
