Ghosts is a particular kind of haunting that has nothing to do with horror and everything to do with honesty. At its core, three ghost stories braided into one. Set against the textured backdrop of contemporary Chicago and the snowbound heartland beyond it, the novel follows three people, each carrying a different kind of haunting, toward an unexpected convergence.
Elizabeth "Liz" Skinner is a sharp-witted, fiercely independent food critic at 52 who has mastered the art of forward motion, right up until the past refuses to stay buried. Her sister Bridget has begun finding her in sleep, vivid, luminous dream-visitations. Her father's long shadow, and the sudden reappearance of her ex-lover Stephen Fishman force her to confront wounds she had filed away as scars.
Stephen's haunting is of his own former life. In his sixties, his marriage collapsing and his career abruptly ended after twenty-five years, he is a man who has become a stranger in a city that no longer seems to see him. His chance reunion with Liz offers a fragile hope of outrunning the man he used to be, a hope tested to its limit on a blizzard-locked highway that strips both of them down to the truth.
And then there is Paul, a small-town bowling alley owner living out the life his late wife once chose for them, surrounded by her memory, her town, and her cats. Of the three, Paul's is the story with the most quietly triumphant outcome. Rather than letting his ghosts consume him, he disarms them with humor, insight, and an act of pure creative will, weaving them into a story that becomes the very fabric of the life he continues to live.
What lingers after the final page is not the chill of the supernatural but something quieter: the recognition that the people we have lost, the lives we have outgrown, and the versions of ourselves we never fully resolved do not disappear.