The key to understanding The Ghost Of The Mary Celeste is in remembering the most important word in its title is the second one and not the final two. Valerie Martin has centered her novel on one of the most famous—and mysterious—missing persons cases in history, but she’s not terribly interested in providing a fictional solution to the question of where all the people on board the Mary Celeste went before the vessel was found drifting in the Atlantic. Instead, she focuses on those left behind, those haunted by the ghosts of all who slipped beneath the waves, never to be seen again.
Thus, the Mary Celeste seems only of glancing importance for roughly half the book. The novel switches its point-of-view character throughout, even shifting between first- and third-person in individual sections; though all of these characters are touched by the abandoned ship in one way or another, some have closer connections to it than others. For instance, much of the book is spent following Arthur Conan Doyle around (he wrote an early-career short story about the “true” fate of those onboard the ship), and while it’s fun to notice the observational skills of his most famous fictional creation creep into his life the more he becomes associated with the great detective, Doyle feels largely incidental to much of the novel’s narrative until near its very end. He’s simply someone who went to sea as a young man and had his imagination set alight one night when he thought he glimpsed the ghost of the ship upon the waves—nothing more, nothing less.