Haunted

Detective Michael Bennett and his family are about to be haunted by a father's worst nightmare--the signs he should have seen and a son's desperate cry for help. Reeling from a crisis that would destroy lesser families, the Bennetts escape New York for a much-needed vacation. An idyllic country town in the Maine woods is haunted by an epidemic emptying its streets and preying on its youth. Turns out the vacation brochures don't tell the full story-the seemingly perfect community has a deadly vice. When local cops uncover a grisly crime scene buried deep in the woods, they consult the vacationing Bennett, who jumps at the chance to atone for his own sins. You can take Michael Bennett out of New York City, but you can't take the cop out of Michael Bennett. But far from the city streets he knows so well, no one will talk to the big-city detective, and the bodies keep piling up.A young, hardscrabble, and forgotten girl is haunted by a traumatic history. Homeless and destitute, she represents the closest thing Bennett has to a partner in his frantic hunt for the ghostlike perpetrator behind the violence. Will Bennett and his unlikely ally unmask the culprit before anyone else winds up haunted?

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.