Amazon Lisa Polisar, Mystery Writer The Ghost of Mary Prairie Category:  Mystery/Suspense Publisher: University of New Mexico Press ISBN-10:  0826342094 Type: Fiction Pages: 279 Copyright: April 16, 2007 ISBN-13: 9780826342096 A fifteen year old boy in rural Oklanhoma, 1961, searches for his long lost sister and, along the way, confronts eerie surprises It's 1961, Grady, Oklahoma, population 103. Fifteen-year-old Jacob Leeds lives in a modest house on Hooper Circle. His world includes a wily sister, provincial parents, a grandfather named Woody, and an obsession with superheroes. Peel back one layer, though, and find a very different Hooper Circle—one teeming with lies, a family cover-up, and a secret that will change Jake forever. The summer of 1961 begins with a teenage initiation rite for Jake, delivered by his best friend, Mikey Savage: “Initiation into Manhood—sleep on bare ground in the old baseball diamond. No sleeping bag, no shoes, no blanket.” How difficult could it be? Pirate songs and funny stories accompany him in the darkness, until he hears the first of the screams. As he approaches the sound, he sees an apparition of a young woman, brutally beaten. He tries to run away, but finds he's running toward her. When Jake tells Mikey the story, he learns the legend of Mary McCann—a murdered Grady girl who to this day haunts the Oklahoma prairie in search of her killer. For Jake, this sighting marks the end of his childhood and the beginning of his quest to find the truth of her story. Excerpt From the Prologue: In 1961, southern Oklahoma was a landscape of hard traditions and miles of empty space. Recycled stories and wide prairies were the sustenance from which everyone drew strength and stability. Families lived in the same houses, on the same ranches and farms and on the same streets as their ancestors before them, and no whim of Darwinian evolution was going to break that chain. And woven into the very strands of this social tapestry was a culture of silence and a graveyard folklore that followed every day and every event like a grim, relentless shadow. It wasn't that more people died here than in other parts of the world. Life was hard, not for some but for all of us who lived its painful cycles and endured all of nature's tricks. Drought, tornadoes, flash floods were the obvious ones, but the real tricks involved watching a man sip his morning coffee and then, after not more than a hiccup, slump over dead in his chair. No logic or analysis could predict these injustices. But we all knew the stories and most of us had first hand knowledge of death, had smelled its damp, rotten breath and watched it perform its slithering, languorous dance through the body of someone we loved. There were 10,000 people in Jefferson County in 1961. So when the news of death arrived, it was likely somebody we had bought milk from or sold eggs to or hitched a ride across the flatlands of Route 32. Death, in this place, was as expected as rain on a cloudy day.

From Back Cover:
"Lisa Polisar's moving story and elegant prose bring vitality and wonder to an age-old theme, turning The Ghost of Mary Prairie into a contemporary masterpiece."

— Pari Noskin Taichert, two-time Agatha Award finalist


From Anne O'Malley - Booklist
In Grady, a fifteen-year-old boy was either in a club or ex-communicated from civilization." Having joined the requisite club, Jake agrees to the dare of a fellow member, requiring him to spend a sweltering summer night entirely alone on the baseball diamond. He flees when a screaming, spectral girl appears on the field and terrorizes him. The experience catapults Jake into an obsessive quest to find out more about the ghost, the legendary "Mary Prairie," and to solve the mystery of her murder. What he uncovers leads right back to a family scandal, a festering Greek tragedy smack in the middle of the Oklahoma flatlands. Although Jake's poetic voice occasionally seems too sophisticated for his 15 years, this novel, set in 1961, offers horror and mystery fans an unusually complex story with plenty of plot twists, memorable characters, and a strong sense of its time and place.