BURDEN FALLS

A long-standing feud simmers with supernatural significance.

It’s been only a year since Madoc Miller killed Ava Thorn’s parents in a car crash, but the tensions between the two families go back generations—and now he’s taking her home. Heir to a faded fortune and a legacy of bad luck, 17-year-old Ava’s forced out of Thorn Manor when Uncle Ty sells the ancestral heap to Madoc and his family. Stuck in Burden Falls, Indiana, for her senior year, Ava is determined not to let the Miller siblings—flamboyant Freya and her older brother, Dominic, a haughty hottie—profit from her family’s tragedies and her private grief. The duo are internet-famous thanks to their phony paranormal web series, but Ava doesn’t want them to exploit Dead-Eyed Sadie, the eyeless ghost who is said to haunt Thorn Manor…and whose appearance supposedly presages death for the Thorns. Already juggling work, school, a complicated friendship, and a budding romance, Ava soon falls under suspicion for a series of deaths and disfiguring attacks. A small-town goth in a gothic tale, aspiring graphic novelist Ava is a tart-tongued, realistically rendered heroine, snarky but sympathetic—think Scooby Doo meets Veronica Mars. Maintaining her knack for spooky suspense, Ellis keeps the tension taut, delivering a gritty whodunit, a spine-tingling supernatural story, and a twisty psychological thriller all in one. Ava and the Millers are White; there is some diversity in the supporting cast.

Atmospherically grapples with literal and figurative ghosts in an eerie Indiana.