MADDIE'S GHOST

In Saller’s middle-grade novel, a tween and her friends race against time to restore her great-grandmother’s good name.

The Stanton family—11-year-old Lainie, Lainie’s widowed dad, Grandpa Jack, Uncle Daniel, and Uncle Patrick—live in a quirky old mansion in Kenwood, Ohio, and have an unusual tragedy in their past. Back in the 1930s, Lainie’s great-grandmother and namesake, Madeleine, was convicted of murdering her supervisor, a pharmacologist. Maddie pleaded self-defense, but the jury discounted her plea and sentenced her to death. After a TV reporter tricks Lainie into an interview about Maddie, the tween swears on air to clear her great-grandmother’s name. A lot depends on Maddie’s little blue diary, which has gone missing, along with some loose papers inside it that contain key evidence. Complicating things further is the fact that Maddie’s youngest child, Cicely (aka Gracie), hid the book decades ago, fearing her mother’s anger for her drawing in it; the child was kidnapped shortly after Maddie’s death, and was only found in an asylum years later. As Lainie and school friends Elle Mendez and Seth Watson investigate, the fun is in the details of discovery, as well as the crush that Lainie has on dreamy Seth (and her angst about it). This is not Saller’s first foray into the mystery genre, which she knows her way around well, but it does stretch credulity a bit that, in the mid-20th century, the state of Ohio would have so easily executed a widow with four young children who’d never committed a crime before. The characterization of the fiercely protective Stanton household is appealing, however, and Saller’s descriptions of their house as a Gothic Victorian treasure of hidden hallways, stairways, cubbyholes, and hidden levers to open hidden doors are wonderful. Every few chapters, the book includes check-ins about the fortunes of the little blue diary, which plays a key role in the narrative.

A fine mystery with winsome characters and a complicated old house, but one that requires some suspension of disbelief.