Mowbray and the Ghosts

Mowbray and the Ghosts is a fantasy-mystery-SF novel of 103,000 words (3rd person POV). It acts as the origin tale for Howard Denson's Mowbray Saga and covers Martin Mowbray from 1908 to the end of the Great War. The twelve-year-old boy was helping inventor Joseph Crocker during a thunderstorm and was sitting on a device made out of an old metal plow. Martin was wearing a metal colander with special devices attached when lightning struck knocking him and the old inventor unconscious. When the boy awakes after two or so days, he can see strange people at Eaton Moor-the ghosts of previous residents. He can also see the old inventor, although he is in a coma in an adjacent room.

His father warns the boy to keep his ability (or curse) a secret lest he become socially ostracized and unemployable when older. Martin walks a tightrope when he communicates with the spirits and finds they have solutions to crimes that have occurred. At Eaton Moor, then Chillinston School, and Albermarle Grange, and later London, Bath, and Brighton, he tries to reveal the truth about supposed kidnappings or suicides to outright murders. He becomes the "temporary" valet-butler for an American industrialist, Robert Watson, and his British wife Mary and, after their deaths, becomes the protector of their son Tommy, all the while worrying about being conscripted for the Great War.