THE DARKLING

Butler creates a likable heroine and fine, atmospheric prose to draw readers along, but it’s not enough to sustain the faulty plotting of this mystery. While on her paper route, Petra, 15, delivers a package to eccentric Edmund Century, who is about to turn 102. He forms a strange bond with Petra, and endows her with three odd gifts—the significance of which the reader never finds out—before he shortly thereafter dies. The secret of his attachment to her slowly and mysteriously unravels through a silhouette on her bedroom wall that Petra had nicknamed “the Darkling” when she was a child. This formerly harmless shadow takes on the spirit of Edmund Century and seeks out his long, lost love whose spirit resides in Petra. Add a spiritually possessed father, a sick brother, a disappearing housekeeper, and the father’s child-molesting boss, and the plot thickens—to an outright muddle. The mystery never comes together: Resolutions remain elusive, except for those explanations with a basis in some confusing real-estate dealings; the storyline of the dead characters is a wedged-in afterthought. (Fiction. 12-14)