THE GIRL IN THE LOCKED ROOM

Can Jules solve the mystery of the ghostly girl in the third-floor window?

Sixth-grader Jules is tired of moving every time her father, who specializes in restoring historic houses, gets a new job. The newest lands them just outside of Hillsborough, Virginia, living in an addition to a crumbling mansion called Oak Hill. While Dad starts to renovate from the ground up and Mom continue to draft her latest mystery novel, Jules is stuck in the middle of the woods with no friends. At first, she doesn’t know she’s being observed by a ghost girl who has forgotten her own name, but soon each begins seeing visions of the other. Something happened in the past that made the ghost girl lock herself in the third-floor room, and the event plays out again every night. With a new local friend, Jules researches what happened at Oak Hill. Can they actually make a difference in the ghost girl’s afterlife? Edgar winner and ghost guru Hahn turns out a surprisingly unspooky history mystery, good for readers who aren’t ready for her chilling Wait till Helen Comes. Jules and the ghost alternate chapters as focal characters; Jules’ are in first person and the ghost’s in an appropriately attenuated third. The menace is mostly in the past in this slightly shadowy, modern fantasy with an alternate-world spin that causes the tale to feel unresolved. The cast is white by default.

A good tale to hand to readers not sure they can handle grisly ghosts.