Vera, the Medium

In 1908, Richard Harding Davis turned his sharp eye for American vice onto the collision of money, mortality, and the supernatural. Stephen Hallowell is dying, wealthy, elderly, and surrounded by vultures. His niece circles like a predator awaiting the inheritance. Journalists camp outside his door, hungry for every cough and tremor. And then there's Vera, a medium who claims she can speak to the dead. Is she a fraud exploiting a dying man's grief, or something far more dangerous? Davis constructs a world where everyone is performing, Vera with her spirits, the niece with her filial devotion, the journalists with their manufactured drama. The real ghost haunting this novel isn't in the séance room; it's the emptiness at the center of American wealth. A darkly funny, sharply observed tale of Gilded Age grift and the desperate human need to believe in something beyond the material.