The Ghost of the Mary Celeste - Valerie Martin

Written by Valerie Martin
Read by Susie Berneir
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC
Release date: January 28, 2014
Duration: 11:46:30

In 1872, the American merchant vessel Mary Celeste was discovered adrift off the coast of Spain. Her cargo was intact, but the crew was gone. They were never found. While on a voyage to Africa, an unproven young writer named Arthur Conan Doyle hears of the Mary Celeste and decides to write an outlandish story about what took place. This story causes quite a sensation back in the United States, particularly between sought-after Philadelphia spiritualist medium Violet Petra and a journalist named Phoebe Grant, who is seeking to expose Petra as a fraud. These three elements—a ship found sailing without a crew, a famous writer on the verge of enormous success, and the rise of an unorthodox and heretical religious fervor—converge in unexpected ways.

AudioFile…
Susie Berneis impresses as narrator of Valerie Martin’s excellent historical fiction. In 1872, the ship Mary Celeste was discovered adrift off the coast of Africa. The undamaged vessel’s cargo was intact, but there was no sign of a single crew member. Berneis gives credible voices to bits and pieces from letters, diaries, ship’s logs, court records, and poetry as the story unfolds. Part sea story, part love story, part ghost story, filled with intriguing characters, from the Mary Celeste’s captain, Benjamin Briggs, and his wife, to Violet Petra, a spiritualist medium, to Phoebe Grant, the tabloid journalist who hopes to expose Violet as a fraud. Berneis moves seamlessly between time periods and human emotions.

Publishers Weekly
Martin uses one of the most baffling maritime mysteries of all time as the starting point for a complex exploration of several different characters, including Arthur Conan Doyle. ….. Doyle, who has not yet created Sherlock Holmes, writes a fictional account of the ship’s fate, in which a lunatic passenger is responsible for a massacre of the others onboard. “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” elicits strong reactions from those who knew the Briggs family. Martin is less concerned with exploring theories about what actually happened than in the repercussions of the baffling disappearances, in a manner that will remind some of the Australian writer Joan Lindsay.