GHOST SHIP

In a distinct change of pace, the author of the “Golden Hamster Saga” crafts an eerie, poignant tale of ghosts and greed in a small resort town. The removal for restoration of an 18th-century ship’s figurehead from the wall of a café, where Vicki and her father work, sparks a series of eldritch events—notably, the sudden appearance of the figurehead’s long-vanished ship, good as new, out in the middle of a bay from which the sea has suddenly withdrawn. With the help of a tourist, her age, named Peter, and a crusading local reporter, Vicki gathers documents and other clues to an old mystery involving a pirated cargo of slaves, a bloody mutiny and a fortune in ill-gotten gold that has both the town’s unscrupulous mayor and a menacing stranger on the hunt. Tucking in a sailor’s tantalizingly incomplete journal, apparitions, nighttime expeditions and other such tasty elements, Reiche moves the plot along on a current of well-timed revelations to a climactic contact across the centuries that leaves the ghostly crew laid to rest and Vicki in possession of a second, previously unsuspected, treasure. The internal logic here is sometimes shaky, but atmospheric writing, ingenious ideas and engaging characters compensate. (Fiction. 11-13)