The Night Strangers, by Chris Bohjalian, Narrated by Alison Fraser and Mark Branhall, Produced by Random House Audio, downloaded from audible.com.

There’s an interview with the author at the end of the audio book. Here’s a ghost story worthy of Halloween. Chip Linton is an airline pilot whose engines fail during flight and he has to land in Lake Champlain. But he doesn’t have the luck that the captain did who landed his airship in the Hudson River-most of the people on Linton’s flight are killed. No one blames him for the crash-he flew into a gaggle of geese-but he blames himself. He can’t get over seeing and hearing the people die, and he can’t live with the guilt that he survived. He stops flying planes altogether. His wife, Emily, is a lawyer working at a corporate law firm in Philadelphia. The family decides to leave Philadelphia, hoping that if they move to rural New England, it will be better for Chip, and Emily too will have a more livable work load. Their twin daughters, Hailley and Garnet, aged 10 and in fifth grade, feel very much like outsiders in their new home, and there are weirdnesses about this house-including a room sealed off by a door with 39 six-inch spikes sealing it off. What’s inside that room, Chip wants to find out. . Emily feels a strangeness in the new town-all the women she meets are named after plants, all have greenhouses, and all are “herbalists”, but they seem to be involved in making tinctures to cure, or in some cases harm, others. As the story progresses, we become aware that this community has a use for twins-they need the blood of a twin who went through trauma. And what do they need a twin for, and does that mean a twin will be killed? And is Chip getting worse-talking to ghosts now? This is a good book, even for someone like me who isn’t terribly into ghosts and vampires or even science fiction. It builds to a climax and a somewhat surprising ending. I don’t like the fact that Chip’s voice is in 2nd person while everyone else’s in in 3rd person. It gives sort of a weird feeling to the book.