Living with the past
A murder from 1943 is reenacted nightly, connecting a historical Oakland event with Remi and Niya’s present-day investigation.
Book details
Jess Mowry - Author
A historical ghost mystery with strong atmosphere: Remi and Niya investigate a repeated murder, a missing child and a house connected to an old crime, while confronting a dangerous supernatural world.
13-year-old Remi DuMont, newly arrived from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where his family lived in poverty, hopes that life will be different in West Oakland, California, where refrigerators, hot running water and television are but three new wonders and some kids are wondrously fat. But when he and his parents move into the second-floor apartment of a spooky old Victorian house in a neighborhood haunted by real-life terrors of gangs, drugs and violence, the last thing Remi expects are ghosts! Every night at 3:13 while his mother and father sleep, Remi hears a train approaching, seemingly headed straight for the house. From his window he sees a murder committed aboard the train as it rumbles past below. Remi, who shares his father's interest in the supernatural, soon realizes that the murderer, the victim, and the train are ghosts; and the murder he sees reenacted each night happened in 1943 when Liberty ships were built in Oakland to help win World War II. Together with his downstairs neighbor, chubby, streetwise, Niya Bedford, also 13, they put together the pieces of this undiscovered crime, which includes the unexplained disappearance of another 13-year-old boy, the son of the elderly and reclusive landlady who lives on the house's dark third floor. In their attempt to solve the mystery by searching for a body they believe to have been buried in the house's basement, Remi and Niya find themselves pulled into the ghostly manifestation where the laws of the living don't apply, becoming ghosts from the future seemingly haunting the past and locked in a life-and-death struggle with a dead murderer and time itself.
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Sign in for personalised guidanceA historical ghost mystery with strong atmosphere: Remi and Niya investigate a repeated murder, a missing child and a house connected to an old crime, while confronting a dangerous supernatural world.
A murder from 1943 is reenacted nightly, connecting a historical Oakland event with Remi and Niya’s present-day investigation.
Remi arrives from Port-au-Prince with his family after living in poverty and encounters unfamiliar material conditions in West Oakland.
Remi and Niya work together to assemble clues about the crime, the missing boy and the suspected burial.
Pay particular attention to fear and suspense.
This is a grounded book brief while Suitabook strengthens the analysis: the current material supports only a cautious reading; another book-specific source is still needed.
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