Ghosts In Glass Houses

Marti Mickkleson sees ghosts. Only her great-grandmother believes her. Since she died the day before Marti was born, her support isn't worth much in the world of the living. When Marti wakes up in a compromising position with her estranged father standing over her, she thinks he owes her a big apology. After all, he's dead and talking to her-and she talks back. Instead, he claims he was murdered and demands she go home and do something about it. She agrees-anything to get her father out of her life and into his own afterlife. In Bicklesburg, she finds her once formidable mother in the throes of dementia, her perfect-prom-queen sister now a lawyer married to a not-so-perfect man, and her bad-boy high school boyfriend a private security guard watching over the family fortress. When her mother wanders away and is found cradling a bloodstained garden gnome, she and Grandma Bertie must uncover a murderer before Marti ends up a ghost herself.

College freshman Claire Danvers has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation, where the popular girls never let her forget just where she ranks in the school's social scene: somewhere less than zero. When Claire heads off-campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life. But they'll have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood. Watch a Windows Media trailer for this book.

A rambling old smuggler's inn, a strange map, an attic packed with treasures, squabbling guests, theft, friendship, and an unusual haunting mark this smart mystery in the tradition of the Mysterious Benedict Society books. Illustrations.

A YA novel set in a seaside New England town in the 1920s, where twelve-year-old Clare discovers a mysterious glass house and falls in love with Jack, the ghost of a boy who can't remember how he died.

“When I was between the ages of five and eight, my sister and I slept in a large attic bedroom. At nightfall the room was filled with gypsies who glided around in clusters. They wore colorful thin flowing dresses and rummaged greedily through my drawers and books as if they would steal everything. I lay in bed as stiff as a board, trying to will myself invisible, praying they would not notice me looking . . . Daylight obliterated the gypsies, rendering them as thoroughly insubstantial as they had been real in the dark. I had a vague understanding that my vision was private, so I never told my family what I saw.” So began Corinne May Botz’s fascination with the invisible, a phenomenon that has profoundly influenced her approach to photography in style and subject matter. For more than ten years, she searched for ghost stories in buildings across the United States. She ventured into these haunted places with both camera and tape recorder in hand; her photographs, accompanied by first-person narratives, reveal a rare glimpse into American interiors, both physical and psychological. This book includes more than eighty haunted buildings, from the legendary to the ordinary, including Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore, a New Jersey tavern, and a Massachusetts farmhouse, a log cabin in Kentucky, and a number of private residences. The text includes ghost stories told to the author by those who lived through the moving rugs, creaking floors, apparitions, disappearing—and reappearing—objects, cries in the night, mysteriously burning candles, and other unexplained occurrences.

“Told with icy precision of eye and ear and a wink of wicked humor . . . First-rate haunted-house creepiness” from the bestselling author of Summer of ’42 (Kirkus Reviews). Austin Fletcher, a disturbed young Vietnam War vet, is willed a small house deep in the woods of northern Maine. He comes to own it by the generosity of a brother-in-arms—a fellow soldier and confidante, Maynard Whittier, killed in action by a wayward mortar shell. The rugged landscape of Maine is an intoxicating blend of claustrophobic interiors and endless frozen wastelands. Little by little, the mysterious force in the house asserts itself until Austin isn’t exactly sure what is in his mind and what is real. And just when our hero’s had enough and is ready to quit the place, a blizzard arrives and the real haunting begins. “An unsettling experience . . . Confounding, touching and well-written.” —The New York Times Book Review

Compelling period fiction for 9+ readers from the Waterstones Children's Prize shortlisted Helen Peters. Evie couldn't be angrier with her mother. She's only gone and got married again and has flown off on honeymoon, sending Evie to stay with a godmother she's never even met in an old, creaky house in the middle of nowhere. It is all monumentally unfair. But on the first night, Evie sees a strange, ghostly figure at the window. Spooked, she flees from the room, feeling oddly disembodied as she does so. Out in the corridor, it's 1814 and Evie finds herself dressed as a housemaid. She's certain she's gone back in time for a reason. A terrible injustice needs to be fixed. But there's a housekeeper barking orders, a bad-tempered master to avoid, and the chamber pots won't empty themselves. It's going to take all Evie's cunning to fix things in the past so that nothing will break apart in the future... Absorbing, brilliant storytelling from the author of The Secret Hen House Theatre, The Farm Beneath the Water, Anna at War and The Jasmine Green Series for younger readers.

On April 17, 1975, after five years of civil war, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas invaded Cambodia's major cities and forced the residents on a mass exodus to the countryside. Their leader, Pol Pot, established a government based on terror to bring about his dream of an agrarian society where work was done by hand--without what he believed to be corruptive influences. By the time the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh and ended this brutal experiment in communism in 1979, an estimated two million Cambodians were dead and hundreds of thousands had begun to flee the country for refugee camps in Thailand. Survivors of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge now living in the Midwest tell their stories in this work. Many of them were children during that time, unable to comprehend exactly what was happening and why, but now able to reveal the trauma they experienced. Noeun Nor and Sinn Lok recollect being wrenched from their families and put into labor camps around the age of five. Prum Nath talks about her mother encouraging her to eat the last grains of her family's rice. Sokhary You remembers giving birth on a mountain without a doctor or hospital and using rusty scissors to cut the umbilical cord.

An instant New York Times Bestseller and August 2017 LibraryReads pick! “Penny’s absorbing, intricately plotted 13th Gamache novel proves she only gets better at pursuing dark truths with compassion and grace.” —PEOPLE “Louise Penny wrote the book on escapist mysteries.” —The New York Times Book Review “You won't want Louise Penny's latest to end....Any plot summary of Penny’s novels inevitably falls short of conveying the dark magic of this series.... It takes nerve and skill — as well as heart — to write mysteries like this. ‘Glass Houses,’ along with many of the other Gamache books, is so compelling that, for the space of reading it, you may well feel that much of what’s going on in the world outside the novel is ‘just noise.’” —Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post When a mysterious figure appears in Three Pines one cold November day, Armand Gamache and the rest of the villagers are at first curious. Then wary. Through rain and sleet, the figure stands unmoving, staring ahead. From the moment its shadow falls over the village, Gamache, now Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, suspects the creature has deep roots and a dark purpose. Yet he does nothing. What can he do? Only watch and wait. And hope his mounting fears are not realized. But when the figure vanishes overnight and a body is discovered, it falls to Gamache to discover if a debt has been paid or levied. Months later, on a steamy July day as the trial for the accused begins in Montréal, Chief Superintendent Gamache continues to struggle with actions he set in motion that bitter November, from which there is no going back. More than the accused is on trial. Gamache’s own conscience is standing in judgment. In Glass Houses, her latest utterly gripping book, number-one New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny shatters the conventions of the crime novel to explore what Gandhi called the court of conscience. A court that supersedes all others.

Scare-master Robert San Souci serves up ten chilling tales about untraditional haunted houses: a mansion full of pirate treasure, a ghost trapped in a mysterious dollhouse, a boy whose vacation house comes complete with people-eating spiders, and many more. But beware because not all of the protagonists in these stories get out alive.