After moving from Florida to Alabama to be with their family, sisters Kayla and Kylie try to make the best of the situation as their family adjusts to the move. When Kylie starts talking about her friend Emily which no one else has met, they start to grow concerned about something more than an imaginary friend as they each begin to experience several chilling ghostly visions the more they stay at the house. Determined to get to the bottom of things, they discover that the graveyard next to the property holds a connection to the dangerous past of the town forcing them to solve the puzzle before it's too late.
This was a generally impressive and worthwhile book with quite a lot going on. The central storyline dynamic at play, offering a fine storyline about the family adjusting to the move to the house as the daughters try to get their lives into a semblance of normalcy following a series of personal crises, provides a great start by also allowing the introduction of the secondary storyline investigating the secrets surrounding the local cemetery. The idea of looking into the past and discovering not just the strange connection between the disease that ravaged the town and the serial killer that struck the town years earlier also works nicely by making the eventual reveal of the ghostly residents who begin following them feel far more mysterious and ramps up the tension nicely alongside the fine work already at establishing the emotional resonance family at the center of everything.
This is what helps make the second half feel far more chilling when the different aspects start getting more physically involved. With the reveal about the presence of the ghost children and what they're trying to accomplish, the increasingly prominent figure from the past that becomes a major force in the story going forward, and the looming threat over the family as they try to look into the different incidents that have taken place, this one keeps things moving along at a rather fun pace and introduces some shocking developments along the way. Some of the twists do seem to come about as a means of keeping the story moving along more when it feels like this could've been ended sooner, but the feverish writing style keeps this one going at such a fun clip that there's little chance of that thought popping up which is quite effective at keeping the reader invested in what's going on.
5/5