From the doorway to the dining room, my mother—Emily Jeanette Nagle Jarvis—looks at me with such contempt I flinch. Even with the frontal and lacrimal bones over her right eye shattered, she has a way of laying bare my soul.

Though how hard is that? It’s all I have left.

— Ghost at Dawn

THE STORY:

Here's the thing about Karen Jarvis: death hasn't stopped her brain from overthinking everything. As a former child prodigy, she's coped with her ghostly existence the only way she knows how - by following ALL the rules. Don't acknowledge the visions, or risk going crazy. Never reach out to the living, or they die. And absolutely don't forget to tap those forty-two special points around the house in exactly the right order, or... well, let's not find out what happens then.

But when a voice from her past suggests that maybe - just maybe - all that people-pleasing perfectionism that left her friendless in life isn't serving her so well in death either, Karen does something unprecedented: she breaks the rules.

Bad move? Maybe. Because now she's discovered she's been manipulated all along, and her off-the-charts IQ is racing to find a way out. The problem? The one weakness she's found in her captor's scheme requires her to trust someone with (gasp) average intelligence.

Now Karen's facing the ultimate test: can she overcome a lifetime of fear and self-doubt in time to save herself and the only real friends she's ever had? Or will her supernatural tormentor prove that even the smartest ghost can be outsmarted?

(Warning: This ghost story contains advanced mathematics, delayed adolescent rebellion, and exactly forty-two mysterious points that absolutely must be tapped in the correct order. Also demons.)

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