few years to live at best. But then she met Anton, who seemed to be Mr. Perfect until his tragic death. Later, Nicola could not get over her loss and engaged a variety of charlatan would-be psychics who claimed they could contact Anton’s spirit.

As I'll Be Waiting begins, Nicola holds one last seance at Anton’s former summer lakefront home. The seance will be conducted by a professor of parapsychology whose specialty is debunking fake psychics. He intends to take scientific measurements to prove or disprove any ghostly manifestations. Nicola brings her brother-in-law and a young woman from her grief support group to lend some support. Strange things occur in or near the house, including a thick swarm of annoying insects outside and weird noises inside.

Nicola is a classic case of an unreliable narrator. Readers eventually learn that she was involved in some seances back when she was in high school that did not go well. Her high school experiences explain, to a large extent, her current-day attitudes. However, the author reveals this information arbitrarily in flashbacks. This makes the book’s central mystery much more entertaining for readers. Through the timing and content of those flashbacks, the author determines how much readers need to know about the events that occurred when Nicola was in high school. These revelations rarely have anything specific to do with what Nicola is doing in the present day but rather because the author feels it’s an excellent time to let readers in on a little more of the backstory. This gimmick can frustrate readers, but the author handles it well. The result is a well-crafted mystery that comes together over the course of the novel.

One shocking discovery (which I won’t reveal) occurs after about 80% of the book. At first, I was thrown off by some of the characters’ subsequent actions in the immediate aftermath of the discovery. I felt the author had lost control of the characters and was making them behave in implausible ways to complicate the plot. When I finished the book, however, the scene made complete sense. I realized my lack of knowledge of crucial facts made the book seem implausible. The author fooled me in the way the best mystery writers sometimes do.

Readers who try to solve the mystery before the author reveals the solution may have difficulty. The author primarily plays fair with readers, leaving most of the clues in the text. However, Nicola occasionally only remembers an important detail late in the book, making it impossible for the readers to precisely piece some earlier events together. My advice to readers would be to just go with the flow, enjoying the surprises as they come.

The author’s emphasis on the mystery elements of I’ll be Waiting comes at the expense of horror. The events Nicola recounts would undoubtedly scare me if I were in the room with her when they happened. However, her narration of events leaves out some details that could have intensified the experience. Nicola glosses over the details of the seances, making the sights and sounds that occur later less potent than they should have been. The horror elements in I’ll Be Waiting are creepy (the book has some graphic violence) but not too scary. The abrupt transitions from present-day events to Nicola’s high-school flashbacks are also jarring at times.

 I’ll Be Waiting is being marketed as ghost horror fiction. It’s really not. It’s a mystery with paranormal elements. The author has written several time-traveling mysteries in another series, and she’s pretty accomplished in the genre. As a supernatural mystery, I’ll Be Waiting is one of the best examples of the genre I’ve read in a long time. Die-hard horror buffs may be disappointed by the relative lack of outright shock moments. Those of us who just enjoy a good ghost story will be mystified and then satisfied by the surprises in I’ll Be Waiting.

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.