The Anatomy of Ghosts

The Anatomy of Ghosts Anyone who has ever visited the two great university towns of Britain, Oxford and Cambridge, knows what it's like to catch a glimpse of velvety green grass and Gothic arcades through a college's front gates and imagine the sanctum devoted to learning and contemplation sheltered within.

Well, maybe you're better off sticking with the imaginary version, because by all accounts the Oxbridge colleges are just as riven by infighting and intrigues as any other small, insular group. "The place was a trap," thinks the hero of Andrew Taylor's "The Anatomy of Ghosts," in reference to the (fictional) Jerusalem College at Cambridge, "and animals caught in traps cannot escape one another."

This man, John Holdsworth, is the author of a skeptical text titled "The Anatomy of Ghosts," and on the strength of that work is hired by a rich and titled lady to disprove the existence of spirits to her addled son, a student at Jerusalem. The year is 1786. Holdsworth, a failed bookseller, wrote his treatise to denounce the spiritualist who preyed on his wife after the drowning of their young son. Now the wife, too, is dead, possibly a suicide but happy assuredly deranged by her grief. Holdsworth takes the job of un-deluding Lady Oldershaw's son because he simply can't think of what else to do with himself.