Rating: 
Summary: a silly and disappointing novel
Review: When I ordered this book I was really excited to read it and I'm still angry because the storyline had a lot of potential. I love novels with supernatural mysteries and murder and the summary on the back cover makes this one sound great. But this book is really bad. First of all, there is NOTHING remotely creepy about it. Sure there are some ghosts but they are just kind of thrown into the story with absolutely no suspense built up around them. And there are a lot of grammatical mistakes. Enough to make you actually stop and reread the sentence. In terms of the actually killings that take place, you only find out about them after the fact, so again there is NO suspenseful build up. And I thought it was unbelievable that after the second friend of Sean's is murdered all he is interested in is having a seance so he can summon up his friend's ghost! It's like where is the grieving here?? The characters are weak and don't help to carry the plot. Again, this was disappointing because they all had potential. If the author had just spent more time with each character they would have been more interesting and had more depth.
Plot aside, the writing is just not that great. Many of the paragraphs are repetitive. It's like the author forgot what he wrote two pages before. This novels main agenda seems to be helping someone who is "coming out of the closet". Sean mentions something about his own coming out of the closet on every third page. This writing is at best junior high level so anyone that still wants to read it should be done in about three hours. I haven't read any of the authors other books, but I really would not recommend this one.
Rating: 
Summary: does not hold up
Review: While I have greatly enjoyed the author's other books, this one was a real let down. I enjoyed the plot, but there were too many mistakes that greatly detracted from the book. There are dozens of gramatical mistakes, spelling and puctuation errors and typo's. Shame on the publisher for allowing such mistakes to be printed.Also, there were some flaws with the writing. My guess is that the author wrote the book over a long period or he did not write it in order. Thus, he constantly repeats the same facts over and over and over, to the point where I wanted to scream "If you tell me the boy is pudgy one more time, I am throwing the book out the window!" Several facts were repeated so many times, it almost became comical. I was also frustrated by the mistakes the author made. For instance, at the height of a very intense scene which takes place in a 100 year old mansion, of which we are told dozens of times has no electricity, the main character reaches into a refridgerator for a cold root beer - huh? Those kind of mistakes distract an intense reader. One other point that bothered me was the complete lack of the main character's parents. Usually I enjoy youth novels that down play the parents' role. In this case, a boy dealing with multiple deaths of friends, it was not realistic to have no parents present at all. If this book was re-editted and mistakes fixed, it would be an excellent read. In it's present form, I cannot recommend it. Read the author's other books, but pass on this one.
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