Book excerpt: “Complete with chatty prose, the requisite tea shop, and spooky clues, Slavin’s delightful novel takes the reader happily all the way to the ever after” (Booklist). Annie Colville can see—and converse with—dead people. She’s had this gift since she was a child, though “gift” may be overstating it since most of what they have to tell her is quite petty and tedious. But when her husband disappears suddenly, he does not come to visit her. So does that mean Evan is still alive? During her long wait to discover what happened to Evan, Annie searches through her mother’s vast collection of lovers for the other missing man in her life—her father—and struggles with the questions her gift asks of her. Who is the mysterious girl who sits by the lake? What happened to the lost woman whose sister has never stopped searching for her? And why are so many of the dead voices called Jim? Quirky, irreverent, moving, and a little bit spooky, this novel by “a highly original talent” will charm you completely—even as it’s raising the hairs on the back of your neck (Beryl Bainbridge, author of An Awfully Big Adventure). “Lightheartedly macabre . . . Slavin has something more subversive up her sleeve than mere entertainment: in conjuring a world of ghosts as likely to bore as to scare her heroine to death, she wickedly skewers a society whose obsession with the afterlife shortchanges life itself.” —The New York Times “Annie endears herself to the reader . . . She embodies a genuine purity of heart.” —Publishers Weekly