Rhian Ellis's striking first novel manages rather miraculously to be both a page-turning thriller of psychological suspense and an acute and tender character study. The book begins with murder
--"First I had to get his body into the boat," is the eye-catching opening line--and proceeds from there to pull us into a sympathetic collusion with the murderess and protagonist, Naomi Ash. "A lonely life is a crime without witnesses," thinks Naomi at one point, "It is a movie playing in a locked theater; can you ever really be sure what happens in it? Can you be sure that it happens at all?" It's an apt question. As a professional spiritualist medium, Naomi is continually caught between the knowledge of her sometimes fraudulent methods and her hopeful faith that perhaps she really does have a gift for communicating with the dead. Perhaps, she thinks, "belief was a decision I could make." But her doubts set her apart from the other residents of Train Line, New York, a tiny town made up of members of the Church of Spiritualist Studies, a collection of New Agers, hypnotists, and fortune tellers, among whom Naomi is a gloomy outsider. For many years, her crime remains a secret. But then the body is discovered, and the careful and aloof life Naomi has built for herself begins to unravel.

This is a book that rediscovers the old-fashioned story-telling virtues of a writer like Shirley Jackson. Like Jackson's wonderful novels, After Life draws us in with a carefully crafted mixture of charm and dread. It's the kind of novel that evokes the supernatural power a good book once had over a reader, the kind of book that you might have curled up with in an easy chair when you were 12, unable to stop reading, not wanting it to end; when you lift your head after the last page, the light has changed, and a ghostly flutter has lodged in your chest.