The Ghost Clause

<strong>National Book Award finalist Howard Norman delivers another provocative . . . haunting* novel this time set in a Vermont village and featuring a missing child a newly married private detective and a highly relatable ghost.</strong> <p/> *Janet Maslin <em>New York Times</em> <p/> Simon Inescort is no longer bodily present in his marriage. It's been several months since he keeled over the rail of a Nova Scotia-bound ferry a massive heart attack to blame. Simon's widow Lorca Pell has sold their farmhouse to newlyweds Zachary and Muriel--after revealing that the deed contains a ghost clause an actual legal clause not unheard of in Vermont allowing for reimbursement if a recently purchased home turns out to be haunted. <p/> In fact Simon finds himself still at home: Every waking moment I'm astonished I have any consciousness . . . What am I to call myself now a revenant? He spends time replaying his marriage in his own mind as if in poignant reel-to-reel while also engaging in occasionally intimate observation of the new homeowners. But soon the crisis of a missing child a local eleven-year-old threatens the tenuous domestic equilibrium as the weight of the case falls to Zachary a rookie private detective with the Green Mountain Agency. <p/><em>The Ghost Clause</em> is a heartrending affirming portrait of two marriages--one in its afterlife one new and erotically charged--and of the Vermont village life that sustains and remakes them.