Ghosts of Gotham

Schaefer fails to innovate on the trope of a professional skeptic encountering something he can’t explain away rationally in this disappointing supernatural thriller. As a child, Lionel Paget was famed for surviving a massacre. Now he’s calling himself Lionel Page, and is the author of Crackpots, Quacks, and Messiahs. He is unsettled when a reporter questions him about his past, and he’s worried that his secrets will become public. Then he’s contacted by a woman named Regina Dunkle, who offers him funding to look into a possibly fraudulent manuscript that is being put up for auction in New York. It supposedly contains the original ending of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. Dunkle wants Page to investigate, and in return, promises to make sure that his past—about which she is mysteriously well-informed—remains buried. Page’s probe into the Poe story involves him with a clichéd femme fatale and a secret society before setting him on a path to preventing an apocalypse that’s connected with his history. Suspense and chills are in rare supply, and there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done much better elsewhere. (Apr.)