The Silent Scream (Nightmare Hall #1) by Diane Hoh

Warning: Contains Spoilers!!!   This is a recap blog which means I read the book and tell you everything that happens so you don't have to read it yourself.  Do NOT continue to read unless you want to know who the bad guy/girl/haunted photograph is.

Tag Line: None.  There's no tag line, y'all.  This is weird.  I don't like it.  Hold me.

From the Back of the Book: High on a hillside overlooking Salem University, hidden in shadows and shrouded in silence, sits Nightingale Hall.  Nightmare Hall the students call it.  Because that's where the terror began.  Jess is eager to start college - until she arrives at her off-campus dorm.  She can see why everyone calls it Nightmare Hall.  Especially when she learns the dark secret hidden within the house.  A girl named Giselle hanged herself there.  In Jess's room.  But was it really a suicide?  Or was Giselle murdered?  Echoing through the house, Jess can still hear the sound of Giselle's last scream.

This book was released in 1993 and I definitely read it.  I read a few of the Nightmare Hall books before finally stopping.  They were very hit and miss.  I've heard rumors that ghost writers turned out some of them, which may explain that.  I have no idea if the ones I liked were actually written by Hoh or not.  Anyway, I remembered absolutely nothing about this book except that I kind of liked it.  It was my turn to pick for the blog and I voluntarily chose this Hoh book. (I never thought I'd use “voluntarily” “chose” and “Hoh” in the same sentence.)  I really hope I'm not confusing this book for something else.  I need to to like this book.

We begin with a prologue. The housemother of the rooming house (Nightingale Hall) has walked into a room and found Giselle McKendrick hanging from the light fixture. She was young and beautiful and no one seemed to know why she'd choose to take her own life. The other five students living in the house soon left the house. They vowed never to return.

The house settled in to wait.

That last bit was a little hokey, but I kind of like the image of a house lying in wait for its next victim.

Chapter one introduces us to our protagonist Jessica. We're told she has short, glossy black hair and navy blue eyes. She's getting ready to start her freshman year of college and she'll be living in Nightingale Hall which is an off-campus dorm. Hoh spends some time describing the town and it sounds pretty and quaint. NH isn't either of those, though. Jess observes with some dismay that it looks like the set of a horror film.

Ian comes up behind her as she's staring at NH. He's tall and has shoulder-length dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. This was my type back in 1993 so that might be the entire reason I kept this book. He's dressed casually and has a camera over one shoulder. Ian says he's there for the fishing and because it's cheaper than living on-campus.

Before they even reach the porch, another boy joins them. This one screams “old money” from his preppy clothes, to his perfectly moussed blonde hair, to his expensive luggage. He says his name is Jon and he picked an off-campus house because he thought the rules would be a little more lax. Jess thinks he seems like a real douche.

There are two more girls and another boy on the porch. Linda is tall, tan and chlorinated. Cath is tiny and tense and dresses like a librarian. Milo is tall, thin and probably eats a lot of granola. We are also introduced to Trucker who is a young handyman with a bad attitude.

I'm on page 12 and we've met 7 people. I hope Hoh's about done because it's standing room only in my head right now.

It turns out that Jess is the “monitor”. I'm not sure what this job entails yet, but it gives her a break on her tuition and a key to the house. She lets the others inside. NH is gloomy and dark inside. Jess wants to open the heavy drapes and let some sunlight in but Cath is afraid of getting in trouble with Mrs Coates (the housemother).

They go upstairs to check out their rooms. Jess is happy with hers. It's light and pretty and all her own. Based on the description of the color scheme, I believe she's in the room where Giselle died. The room feels cold to her despite the August heat outside. She rationalizes the cold spot pretty well and just decides to wear sweaters.

This is pretty real to me. My freshman year I was so excited to be moving into the dorm that I would have done the same exact thing. The entire floor could have been made of broken glass and I would have said “Oh, well, I'll just wear shoes 24/7”. You'll put up with about anything in order to be on your own.

Jess goes around to see how everyone is settling in. She wants to have a get-to-know-you party that night on the porch. Mrs Coates arrives and seems like a nice, elderly lady who just wants her “kids” to be friends.

The party starts off well enough. They eat bad pizza and talk about why they're living off campus. Jess, Linda, Milo and Ian are there because it's cheaper. Linda is at college on a swimming scholarship and Ian on a baseball scholarship and neither get room and board. Cath's parents thought living off-campus would be less “distracting” for her. Then Ian ruins the mood by telling them about Giselle hanging herself in the room where Jess now lives.

Someone mentions the word “suicide” and a window upstairs slams shut all by itself. It's a Hoh so I think we can assume something supernatural is at work here. Milo must have read a few Hoh's in his time because he theorizes that the house must be haunted. Everyone else is disturbed or annoyed by this supposition (must be Stine readers instead) and they decide to clean up the pizza and go to bed.

Mr Coates comes to the top of the stairs when they come in to ask them how the party went. One minute she's standing there and the next she's hurtling through the air. No one can figure out how it happened. She thinks she has a broken hip so they call the ambulance for her. She asks them to call a friend of hers to come stay in the house because they aren't supposed to be unsupervised. Jess tries to call but there is no answer.

Everyone except Cath is okay staying in the house alone. She's worried her parents will find out there's no chaperon and make her leave school. Trucker tells Jess that she can go ahead and call Mrs Coates's friend because there's no way she'll come stay. She hates anyone under 50. Cath still isn't convinced. She thinks the house is creepy and the way the wind moans through the house is putting her nerves on edge. She yells that it's no wonder Giselle committed suicide after living in that house. As soon as she says the word, all the lights go out.

They learn that Trucker lives in the apartment over the garage.

There's really nothing else to say about that. Now there's this awkward sentence sticking out in the middle of my blog like a prairie dog who just heard a hawk cry. 

I hate prairie dog sentences.

Jess goes up to her room. She stays up late organizing meal schedules and chore charts and then falls asleep. She isn't asleep long when a piercing scream wakes her up. She can't figure out where it came from and wonders if the place really is haunted.

The next day they register for classes and buy their books. Jess is alarmed to see her Lit book used to be owned by Giselle. Well, that's a completely believable coincidence. {sarcasm} The odds of that happening in a college with a required 101 freshman-level course is staggering. I cannot even suspend my disbelief to buy this one. Jess decides she's going to find some other freshman to trade books with her because she can't bear the thought of reading a book that Giselle has read.

After dinner, everyone but Milo goes out to explore the town. Most of the college has the same idea and everything is super crowded. They end up at come kind of arcade. Trucker joins them, mentioning he signed up for a couple of night courses that day. Ian and Jess go into a photo booth and they're stunned when the pictures come out of the machine. There's a third girl in the pictures although she wasn't in the booth with them. She looks blurry but her long pale hair and sad face are visible.

Ian explains the image away by saying it must be a double exposure. The girl went in before them and the film got stuck and was printing everyone else's pictures on top of hers. The group buys the explanation because he's a photographer and, honestly, it IS reasonable. Jess isn't so sure. She doesn't think any person as sad as that girl looked would be at an arcade taking pictures of herself. I kind of agree with her on this one.

The next week passes in a flurry. They're all a little overwhelmed by the college workload but they still find time to fit in some fun. Ian gets a job taking pictures for the campus newspaper, Jon goes out with a different girl every night and Linda is super busy with swimming. As the days pass, Cath seems to withdraw more and more. She spends most of her time in her room studying and grows pale and snappish. The others worry about her.

One night Jess is in her room when she hears a hysterical Cath yelling and pounding on her door. The paper she's been working on forever has disappeared from her room and it's due the next day. Cath accuses Milo of stealing it because he has the same class and hasn't even started his own paper. She goes to ransack his room but doesn't find it. Milo is furious. Linda, who loves Milo with all her heart, is furious. Jess doesn't know who to believe. She doesn't really know any of these people despite living with them.

During a study-break-popcorn-snarfing-session, Jess learns that Linda, Jon and Ian were all on campus in June for an orientation. This has RED HERRING written all over it, so I'm mentioning it.

The next morning, a man in a military uniform shows up at the door. He's Giselle's brother and he's here to pick up her trunk. Jess is stunned when he greets Milo like an old friend. Apparently Milo and Giselle were close friends growing up. Once they got to High School, she became popular, started dating a guy who lived out of town and dropped Milo.

Later that day when Jess returns home from the university, there are muddy footprints in the upstairs hall. They weirdly start in the middle of the hall as if someone was dropped from the ceiling onto that spot and they lead into Jess's room. She can't figure them out but decides to just clean them up and go on with her life. As she's cleaning, the footprints begin to just fade away as if they never existed at all. This is extremely freaky but apparently Jess is able to ignore it and go into her room to take a nap.

Mud disappears into thin air in front of her very eyes and she just goes to take a nap? Come on.

As she wakes up from her nap, Jess thinks she sees a shadow on her wall of someone hanging from the light fixture. Jess screams and then Hoh does this super annoying thing where she headhops into every single characters head to tell us what they were doing when Jess screamed. Trucker, Milo, Linda and Ian were the only ones to hear it. Of those, everyone but Trucker ran to Jess to see what was wrong.  Hmmm.  Why no Trucker?  They convince her that she was dreaming and everyone leaves to get ready for some rando party.

At the party, Jess meets a sophomore named Beth who knew Giselle. She tells Jess that the day before Giselle died, she saw Giselle being physically manhandled on campus. A person (she couldn't tell from a distance whether it was a male or a female) was pulling her hair and being generally rough with her. Giselle got away and ran. The person chased after her. All Beth can remember is that the person had long, dark hair and she didn't think it was a person she'd ever seen on campus before. I don't know how the hell she came to that conclusion when she said she couldn't even tell if it was a guy or a girl. Clearly she didn't get a good look so how could she possibly know it wasn't a person she'd seen on campus before? It's not like that means something anyway. College campuses are usually big enough that you can't possibly know every single person enrolled. But Hoh clearly means this as a Red Herring so.....suspect Ian, won't you? For Hoh? Because she wants you to?

Jess ends up dancing with Ian for most of the party. She's really into him and keeps hoping he'll ask her to the Fall Ball. He doesn't and she wonders if he simply doesn't have the money to pay for tickets and a corsage and all that jazz. She thinks about just asking him but she doesn't have the money for tickets and a dress. There's a lot of Fall Ball angst here, y'all. It's getting old fast.

Despite just acknowledging that she didn't have money for the Fall Ball, Jess is still disappointed when Ian hasn't asked her to go by the end of the evening. She kind of hurries off to her room to sulk but he ends up knocking. When she answers, he grabs her and starts kissing her right there in the doorway. She enjoys it immensely.

Jess decides later to seek out Beth and ask her some more questions.  Every fucking time that Hoh mentions Beth, she calls her “the heavyset girl”. Fuck you, Hoh. We are people. Human beings. We are NOT our body type. I am fat but I really hope when people think of me in their heads they think of “Mimi” not “Fat Mimi”. I hope they're not saying “I'm going to Target with Fat Mimi later” or “I looked all over for Fat Mimi but I couldn't find her”. Just fuck off, Hoh.

The next day, Jess is studying when she hears Linda screaming. She rushes to Linda's room to find the other girl in hysterics. There's a swim meet in an hour or something and someone has slashed Linda's university-required-swimsuit to ribbons. Linda doesn't have an extra because they were so expensive. Cath is less than sympathetic. She points out that now Linda knows how she feels and her paper was far more important than a stupid swimsuit. Linda is hella pissed, yo. She accuses Cath of slashing her suit in retaliation for Linda sticking up for Milo during papergate. Cath denies. Jess plays peacemaker and encourages Linda to ask someone on the team for a suit to borrow so she doesn't have to miss the meet.

The next afternoon, Jess returns home to change her clothes after classes. The contents of her dresser look like they've been rearranged but she can't be 100% sure. She reaches deep into the drawer to get a shirt out and when she pulls her arm out, it's covered in worms.

Seriously, Hoh? Was this absolutely necessary?

So gross.

Jess removes her clothing to find the entire bottom of the dresser drawer filled with worms. She screams and Hoh does that damn headhopping thing to tell us what Ian and Trucker were doing when they heard the scream and how they reacted. Hella annoying.

The boys arrive to save the day and dispose of the worms. They take the drawer out back to empty it and then they hose it down and bring it back. Some papers had fallen into the opening when they removed the drawer, so Ian collects those before he puts the drawer back in. He and Jess decide they're going to go into town to eat Chinese food for supper.

The next night.......this is becoming a pattern, isn't it? Everything is “the next night” or “the next morning”. Anyway, the next night, Jess is in Linda's room helping her get ready to go to the library with Milo. They are talking about how Linda never dated in high school because she was so tall and none of the boys liked her. Somehow the subject gets on Giselle and Linda says the suicide word again. As soon as she does, her mirror explodes into a million tiny pieces.

In bed that night, Jess decides to go through the papers Ian had picked up the day before. Some of them were hers, but some clearly weren't. Among them, there was a picture of Giselle that someone had drawn a thick black line through. Jess realizes Giselle is the person that appeared in the photo booth picture of her and Ian on their first night in the house. There's also a letter.

“Dear Giselle,

Your time has run out. You've stalled long enough. You haven't answered any of my phone calls or letters. So I'm coming there and you'd better be ready to leave with me. I'm not taking no for an answer.

Your Forever Love.”

Oh, good. We hadn't had the appearance of the jealous, possessive, abusive boyfriend yet. I was getting scared we might actually make it through a Point Horror book without one. I'm relieved. It feels like home now.

At breakfast the next morning, Jess shows everyone the letter and the picture. She tells them that she thinks the other letters must be there in the house somewhere and she wants to find them. She no longer believes Giselle killed herself and she thinks the letters will be the key to finding out what happened to the girl.

My guess is she just passed the bad guy evidence against him and now she's going to have to be silenced. Of course, everyone else at the table saw it too, so that's a lot of silencing but I'm predicting bad guy only goes after Jess and everyone else is collateral damage at best.

Hoh throws some Red Herrings at us here, so I advise you to duck.

{{SPLAT}}

See? Next time you'll listen to me. I'll wait while you clean the fish juice off your face.

Ian gets annoyed with Jess for wanting to play “Sherlock Holmes” and she recalls Heavyset Beth (because that's her fucking legal name) saying that Giselle fought with someone with long dark hair. Ian has long dark hair and was on campus at the time.

Keeping ducking.

{{SPLAT}}

Ah. Good job. You learned your lesson.

Then she remembers overhearing a conversation of Jon's where he confessed to having a “thing” for blonde, blue-eyed babes.  Giselle was a blonde, blue-eyed babe.  He was also on campus at the time.

Incoming.

{{SPLAT}}

You're an old pro now.

Then she considers Milo who was ALSO ON CAMPUS AT THE TIME and who had a connection to Giselle that he tried to conceal.

The only one Hoh didn't link to Giselle's death was Trucker. So you know what that means, right???

It's effing Trucker. It HAS to be. Hoh just telegraphed that shiz all over the place. Way to go, Hoh.

Cath comments that it's a shame Giselle took her own life and the cellar door violently flies open and crashes into the wall. Ghost Giselle is getting pretty pissed with all this suicide talk. They should knock it off before birds start attacking the house.

Later, Jess wonders if all the weird pranks have just been distractions. Excuses for someone to search the rooms. She thinks they're probably looking for the letters. Ian is on her case hard about getting rid of the photo and letter and she wonders why he's so insistent on the matter. Well, because Hoh is trying super hard to make you suspect Ian, my sweet, when the rest of us know it's effing Trucker.

That evening it's gloomy and stormy and they all gather in the living room around the fire. At one point, Linda notices that Milo's notebook is crammed full of papers and she teasingly grabs it, asking why it's stuffed when he never actually does any work. To absolutely no one's surprise, Cath's missing paper falls out it. Hilarity ensues. As long as you think tedious, over-blown drama is hilarious.

Everyone scatters and Ian and Jess are left alone. He finally fulfills his one purpose in life...and in this book...by asking Jess to the Fall Ball. She almost turns him down because she's still dripping with that big, fat Red Herring Hoh threw earlier. Then she decides he's way too dreamy to be evil and accepts. 

Normally I'd snark at this, but it's effing Trucker so she's fine.

The next night everyone is headed to a fraternity party so Jess decides this is the perfect opportunity to search for Giselle's letters. She starts in her room but doesn't find anything. She's about to move on to Linda's room when she hears a sound downstairs. This prompts her to look out the window (I guess for Jon's car??? I don't really know why.) and she sees a flashlight bobbing toward the outside doors to the cellar. A few seconds later, all the electricity in the house goes off.

Jess makes her way downstairs in the darkness. She remembers that Trucker mentioned having to work on the furnace and she wonders if he cut the electricity to do that, not realizing she hadn't gone to the party with the others. She makes her way to the cellar and opens the door. It's completely dark and quiet below. She knows Trucker can't possibly be working down there without some kind of light so she wonders if he already finished and went home, forgetting to turn the power back on. That's kind of dumb. He surely would have tried to turn a light on before he left and then noticed there was no power. I'm disappointed in Jess. She's smarter than that. She decides to go to his apartment over the garage to ask him to turn the lights back on, but before she can move, someone hits her from behind and pushes her down the cellar stairs.

Jess comes to locked in the cellar. There's a hissing noise and she can smell gas. She tries both cellar doors in an attempt to save herself but neither opens. She finds the furnace in the dark but the shut-off valve has been removed. Naturally. There's something woolen caught on a nail on the wall and she tears some of it free to hold over her mouth and nose. She does a little more exploring and finds some kind of valve on an outside wall. She thinks it leads to the furnace so she puts all her effort into turning it. I fully expected water to start gushing from somewhere but, no, it was indeed a gas line and the hissing stops. She knows she has to get out, though, because the air is still poisonous.

In the dim light, she sees a high, dirty window. She tucks the piece of wool (which I'm sure is going to be a crucial piece of evidence in a hot minute) in her pocket and endeavors to break the window. It takes her awhile, but she is able to break the glass and climb up and out of the cellar. As soon as she reaches the outside, she sees a pair of sneakers in front of her and someone puts a foot on her back so she can't get up. She isn't sure who it is and she can't recognize the voice when he/she talks because it's in a whisper.

He....and it's clear it's a he....actually, it's clear to ME that it's effing Trucker but Jess is an idiot....says that Giselle lied to him. She told him she would only go to college for a year and then she'd come back and marry him. But instead, she stopped taking his phone calls and answering his letters. And now Jess had to come along and drag it all up again when everyone else had already forgotten.

She searches the ground for some kind of weapon and finds a thick piece of glass from the broken window. The bad guy straddles her back and slips a rope noose over her head. Jess manages to get a swipe in with the glass and it makes him furious. He starts to strangle her but a car pulls into the driveway and he runs away. Jess tries to get up and run but being nearly gassed and nearly strangled has made her incredibly dizzy and she passes out.

This time when she comes to, Jon's car has pulled into the driveway and her housemates are all getting out. Jon tells Trucker to go turn on some lights because the house is completely dark. She calls out to them and they eventually find her and bring her into the house. She tells them the story and then pulls the wool scrap out of her pocket. Linda recognizes it as a piece of a baseball jacket that she's seen hanging in Milo's room. Jess realizes that Milo isn't with them and she asks why he didn't come back from the party with them. Ian says that Milo changed his mind at the last minute and didn't go.

Now everyone thinks Milo is the bad guy and they run up to search his room. Sure enough, they find all the letters to Giselle in his room and they stop to read them. Hoh goes to the trouble to write them in for us but I'm too lazy to quote them all out. Basically Giselle's “forever love” is getting angrier and angrier that she won't return his calls or letters. He threatens to come to the university to make her pay for lying to him.

Linda hotly defends Milo. When Jess tells her that it must have been someone from the house that attacked her, Linda points out that Ian and Jon both left the party at some point and it could just as easily be one of them. Again, Hoh makes a huge, glaring point of leaving Trucker OUT of the suspicion which only throws a spotlight ON him. If she truly wanted to hide him, she'd throw some shade his way too. It's at this point that Milo comes in wearing his torn baseball jacket.

Jess accuses him of every evil deed in the world. Milo denies them all. He says his jacket has been missing for week. Tonight he was at the library and he left his table to go downstairs.  When he returned, the jacket was hanging on his chair with a rip in it. No one believes him. Even Linda is skeptical now. It's not in Milo's character to be in a library and she says she was there for a minute earlier returning books and didn't see him.

Oh, for fuck's sake. Seriously? Has Hoh ever been in a university library? I went to a very small college and the library was three stories in total. But let's just imagine this library is teeny tiny for one second. Even if it was, there are still tall bookcases everywhere. It would be impossible to see every square inch of a library from a single vantage point like the return desk. He could have been somewhere in the stacks and she never would have seen him.  Besides, he's already told them he was downstairs for part of the time.

Jess shouts at Milo for awhile and it's pretty ridiculous. It reads like one of those old Perry Mason episodes. “And that made you angry, didn't it? (long dramatic pause) Angry enough...dun dun dun...to KILL her!!” {gasp}

Milo gets well and truly pissed and starts packing a bag. He tells them he'll be back at some point for the rest of his stuff and not to fuck with his things and he leaves. Jess wants to stop him but Ian points out that they have no real proof of anything to take to the police.

A week passes. It's the night of the Fall Ball and Jess decides it's her job as house monitor to pack up Milo's room and remove all traces of him from the house.

Wait.

It's been weeks. Weeks. Mrs Coates is still in the hospital? Wow.

Anyway, Linda and Trucker offer to help her pack things up. She discovers a typewriter in the bottom of the closet. No one can ever remember Milo using one. Jess tries it out and, unsurprisingly, the type matches the Giselle letters.

Jess wants to take everything to the police right then but Ian convinces her to wait until Monday so they can go to the Fall Ball. They go and have a boring, dreamy evening. Everyone else goes out for food after, but Jess and Ian decide to walk home alone. When they reach the house, they decide to sit outside for awhile. The air is chilly and Ian runs inside to get Jess a jacket.

Then Hoh treats us to a very convenient happenstance. VERY convenient. Sigh.

A girl arrives right just then at the house to return a jacket to Milo. She tells Jess that they had been studying at the library a week ago and it was rainy outside so Milo loaned her his jacket when she left to walk home. (Did I miss the fact it was raining while Jess was laying outside after escaping the killer??) She tells the story of her and Milo being downstairs and returning to the table to find his baseball jacket on the chair. Then she volunteers that Milo was downstairs the entire evening with her at the library computers because he doesn't own a typewriter and his history professor wouldn't accept any more handwritten papers. He hired her to type his paper because he can't type but she couldn't read his handwriting so he had to sit there and dictate it to her for four solid hours. 

This is so dopey.

The girl leaves and Jess realizes that she's unjustly accused poor Milo. She hears a voice calling her name from the direction of the creek and assumes it's Ian and he's found them some romantic spot to sit down by the water. Because that's exactly what would happen. She's such an idiot. Ian would have come back and walked her to his romantic spot. He'd never make her walk alone in the dark. At least, I hope he wouldn't. But this is Point Horror so who the hell knows?

Anyway, she heads for the creek. Once there, she sees a picture of Giselle submerged in the water, the corner pinned under a rock. She hears movement behind her and turns, expecting to see Ian.

It's effing Trucker.

Seriously, Hoh. So obvious.

Trucker tries to put more suspicion on Milo. He says Milo left the picture of Giselle in the water for Jess to find. But she knows better now. Trucker's shirt gapes open and she sees a jagged cut. She realizes it was Trucker that she cut with the glass the week before. Trucker goes to retrieve the photo as Jess stupidly drops her poker face and asks him what he's done to Ian.

The jig is up.

Trucker tells her that Ian is “tied up” but okay. He then launches into his bad guy monologue about how he was there for Giselle when her life was falling apart and she was abandoned by everyone else and how she repaid him by tossing him aside as soon as she got to college. He takes a wire garrote out of his pocket and she absurdly thinks it looks like a necklace. Trucker reveals his master plan to kill Jess and Ian and leave them in the creek. He'll leave a note saying they went off to a hotel or something for privacy. Then when the others are all asleep in their beds, he'll fill the house with gas again and let it explode.

Just as Trucker's about to wrap the wire around Jess's neck, the photo of Giselle breaks free from the creek and molds itself to Trucker's face. It covers his eyes and seals off his mouth and nose so he can't breathe. Trucker struggles to get it off his face and he slips and hits his head on a rock in the creek. Death by ghostly photograph, yo. You really can't get much better than that.

The others arrive then. Milo's with them. He says he knew it was Trucker because they were the only two alone with Giselle's trunk and the only two who could have taken the letters. Obviously he knew he didn't take them, so that just left Trucker. He went back to his hometown to talk to Giselle's dad and found out that Trucker was the guy Giselle was dating (under a different name). Putting it all back together, he returned to Nightingale Hall to expose Trucker and found Ian tied up in a closet. Everyone else arrived home and they realized Jess was missing. Ian glanced outside and saw the flashlight glowing by the creek and we know the rest.

As they walk away from the creek, the photograph of Giselle peels itself off Trucker's face and takes flight gracefully into the air. Jess realizes that Giselle has been trying to reach out all along and she thanks her for her help.

The End.

Final Thoughts:  Other than "Heavyset Beth" and "effing Trucker", this was a pretty good book.  The supernatural elements were spooky and made sense in the story.  I think the only part that didn't make sense was Mrs Coates being "pushed" down the stairs.  I'm not sure what Giselle's ghost was trying to accomplish with that.  I think Hoh couldn't send Mrs C to Europe so she had to do something.  Jess wasn't super annoying and that was a WELCOME change from the last few books.  I might find more of the series and try to sort out the good ones from the bad ones.  Of course, my manager isn't going to let me recap them since I liked this one.  :o)