Fourteen-year-old Horace works as an apprentice to a photographer who has just been hired by a wealthy grieving woman. She wants him to take a portrait of her so that she can place it next to the grave of her recently deceased daughter. Sensing fiscal opportunity, the photographer decides to take advantage of the woman’s distress by using double-exposure to make it appear as though the ghost of the dead daughter has been captured by his camera. What he doesn’t know is that the woman really is being haunted by the girl, who turns out to be not her daughter but a niece whom she treated cruelly before her death. Horace learns these details through conversations he has with the woman’s servant girl while doing his own secretive picture taking at their home under his boss’s orders. To his dismay, he discovers the images he takes really are haunted by the ghostly image of the girl, whose spirit is out for revenge. Part ghost story, part mystery, this engaging novel set in New York City in 1872 offers a strong sense of time and place, as well as fascinating details about early photography. The author is particularly skilled at using formal, old-fashioned language to give a sense of history, but he’s smart enough not to overdo it. (Ages 9–11)

Newbery Medalist Avi weaves one of his most suspenseful and scary tales—about a ghost who has to be seen to be believed and must be kept from carrying out a horrifying revenge.

The time is 1872. The place is New York City. Horace Carpetine has been raised to believe in science and rationality. So as apprentice to Enoch Middleditch, a society photographer, he thinks of his trade as a scientific art. But when wealthy society matron Mrs. Frederick Von Macht orders a photographic portrait, strange things begin to happen.

Horace's first real photographs reveal a frightful likeness: it's the image of the Von Machts' dead daughter, Eleanora.

Pegg, the Von Machts' black servant girl, then leads him to the truth about who Eleanora really was and how she actually died. Joined in friendship, Pegg and Horace soon realize that his photographs are evoking both Eleanora's image and her ghost. Eleanora returns, a vengeful wraith intent on punishing those who abused her.

Rich in detail, full of the magic of early photography, here is a story about the shadows, visible and invisible, that are always lurking near.