With this compelling gothic mystery, Staub (The Last to Know) puts a fresh spin on the haunted house formula. Three years after the drowning of his live-in girlfriend, Kristin, Paine Landry is forced to return to Lily Dale, N.Y., a gated resort community of spiritualists and mediums, to settle his former mother-in-law's affairs. Her equally bizarre drowning there makes staying in the dilapidated Victorian—inherited by his blind, six-year-old daughter—trying for the skeptical Paine, who wants nothing more than to learn the truth behind their deaths. When Paine's daughter and Julia Garrity, Kristin's erstwhile childhood friend and a practicing psychic medium, admit to "seeing" a tortured ghost in the house, Paine decides to sell it back to its former owner, an elderly man whose only wish is to bring his dying wife "home." Too late, Paine and Julia realize that the ghost was trying to warn them of a dangerous force, the same force that claimed Kristin and her mother. Staub deftly weaves several subplots throughout, but a profusion of secondary characters—including a pair of bumbling paranormal investigators, Julia's two-timing boyfriend and Kristin's greedy half-brother—only serve to complicate an already complex tale. Still, Staub's prose is energetic, and her characters possess enough genuine warmth to keep readers captivated. (Mar.)
