The Haunting of Maddie Prue, the new book from Nova Scotia-based historical novelist Alfred Silver, is complex and enchanting, both a well-crafted mystery and a subtle, poignant ode to lost love and misspent youth.

It’s a story of two men obsessed with the same woman, but living 100 years apart. In 1995, Corporal H.P. Ryon of the RCMP, posted in rural Manitoba, receives a mysterious package: a bootleg tape of songs by two former members of Anemone, a rock band he carried amps for 20 years earlier. The delivery parallels one made in 1895 to Henry J. Ryon, a disgraced Englishman banished to Manitoba. He receives a book of poems by a couple once associated with a group of poets called Anemone, who had been on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelites.

What had made Anemone – the rock band – memorable was Maddie Prue, a beautiful, ferociously talented musician and poet who held audiences spellbound with her singing voice, epic verses, and reputation for dabbling in the occult. Maddie died a young woman, drowning after a fall off a coastal cliff. Was it really an accident? Corporal Ryon begins to think not, and embarks on a journey into a past he’s spent 20 years not thinking about.

I was utterly hypnotized by The Haunting of Maddie Prue. Silver weaves skillfully in and out of 20th-century New York and 19th-century London without losing the essential thread of the story, and makes Corporal Ryon’s evolution from a placid middle-aged has-been to a doomed Romantic hero both believable and sympathetic. He creates a vivid portrait of the elusive Maddie, seen mainly through Ryon’s increasingly fragmented and hallucinatory memories of her. Silver also works in cameos by real-life Pre-Raphaelites and rock musicians, and discussions of Celtic myth and Jungian psychology, without ever hitting a wrong note. My one complaint is that the novel’s ending seemed too abrupt, though it may just be that I didn’t want the tale to end.