The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

On December 6, 1973 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, Susie Salmon takes a shortcut home from school. She is accosted by a neighbor, George Harvey, a man in his mid-30s who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has recently built nearby. Once she enters, he rapes and stabs her, cutting her body into parts, and then collapses the den. An elbow, the only part of Susie ever to be found, falls out of his bag as he returns home, disposing of the remaining parts of the body by putting them in a safe and paying someone to drop it in a sinkhole. Meanwhile, Susie's spirit flees toward her personal heaven. The Salmon family is at first reluctant to accept that Susie has been killed, but then accedes when Susie's hat and elbow are found. The police who talk to Mr. Harvey find him odd but see no reason to suspect him. Jack, Susie's father, becomes suspicious and later comes to harass the police about Harvey. Susie's sister Lindsey comes to share these suspicions. Jack, consumed with guilt over not having been able to protect his daughter, remains on extended leave from work and increasingly isolates himself at home. Buckley, the youngest child in the family of five, tries to make sense of all this as he starts school. One day late in the summer a detective named Len Fenerman comes to tell the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. That night in his study, Jack looks out the window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. Believing it to be Harvey returning to destroy evidence, he runs out to confront him with a baseball bat. It turns out to be Susie's best friend, Clarissa, and her boyfriend Brian looking for a place to make out. Brian and Jack struggle and Jack is struck with the bat. As a result he has to have knee replacement surgery. In the wake of this, his wife Abigail begins having an affair with Fenerman, who is a widower. The following summer Abigail leaves her husband, going to her father's old cabin in New Hampshire and then moving to California, taking a job at a winery. As a result her mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons' home to help her son-in-law care for Buckley and Lindsey. Still suspicious, Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a drawing of the pit and is forced to leave when Harvey returns prematurely. Sensing threat, Harvey leaves Norristown as soon as possible and becomes a drifter. A year later the police bulldoze the cornfield and turn up a soda bottle from the night of the murder with Harvey's and Susie's fingerprints, finally making him an official suspect. However, he remains at large. That fall, a hunter in Connecticut discovers the body of another one of Harvey's victims, and one of Susie's charms nearby. In 1981, a detective in Connecticut links the charm to Susie's murder and calls Fenerman. As they uncover further evidence, the police realize that Harvey is a serial killer. Lindsey and her boyfriend Samuel Heckler become engaged, find an old house in the woods that Ruth's father owns and decide to fix it up and live there. Sometime after the celebration, while arguing with his son, Jack suffers from a heart attack. The emergency prompts Abigail to return from California, but the reunion is tempered by Buckley's lingering bitterness at her for having abandoned him and his father. Meanwhile, Harvey returns to Norristown, which has become more developed. Having explored his old neighborhood and seen that the school is being expanded into the cornfield where he killed Susie, he drives by the sinkhole where Susie's body is, and where Ruth Connors and Ray Singh are standing. Ruth, an old classmate of Susie's who had felt Susie's spirit go past her after her murder, senses the women Harvey has killed and is overcome, as is Susie watching from heaven, and they exchange positions. Susie, her spirit now in Ruth's body, kisses Ray, who had a crush on Susie in school, and they go to the back room in Hal's bike shop to make love. Afterwards, Susie returns to heaven. She moves onto the larger heaven, still watching earthbound events from time to time. She sees her sister's newborn baby girl, who is named Abigail Suzanne. One day she spies Harvey getting off a Greyhound bus at a diner in New Hampshire in early spring. Behind the diner he sees a young woman and attempts to speak to her, but she rebuffs him. Susie notices some large icicles hanging from the roof, and after the woman leaves one falls and hits Mr. Harvey on the head, knocking him into a nearby ravine and ultimately killing him.

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