From Booklist
Seven-year-old Calley Dakin is thrown into the all-female whirlwind of her mother's family when her father is gruesomely murdered. The Carrolls fancy themselves Alabama aristocracy and scheme amongst themselves as well as with others to grab the wealth that undergirds the pretense. That scheming involves Calley, whose extraordinary ears hear not only the living but also the dead, whom she sometimes sees, too. She doesn't know she's the eye of the family storm, much less who she can trust, as she is carted from home to Grandmother Mamadee's to the Victorian house on the Gulf of Mexico in which she grows up. McDowell, who wrote the stories on which Beetlejuice and The Nightmare before Christmas are based, hadn't finished this lightly supernatural confection when he died in 1999. King completes it beautifully as to tone, aura, and flavor, and it's funny and intriguing, magnetically readable.

Left on the bookshelf near the door.