<p><b>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.</b></p><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><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><p><i>The Ghost Clause</i> 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.</p>