Best-selling YA author Maureen Johnson doesn't believe in ghosts. In fact, when people try to tell her a ghost story—even a good one—she just isn't interested. So it seems a bit ironic that her new novel can best be described as, well, a very clever ghost story. 

On a transatlantic phone call from her second home in Guildford, England (she splits her time between New York City and Guildford, where her English boyfriend lives), Johnson explains how she got the idea for her latest book, The Name of the Star. "I was in London doing some research for [my previous novel] The Last Little Blue Envelope on a historical tour. They kept mentioning ghosts, and I kept thinking, ‘These ghosts are not very good at what they do.' The ghost is always a cold spot in the room or a shadow; it moves a spoon, or a door creaks. And I thought, what you should have is a ghost that comes back and it's totally insane and kills everyone! Now that would be something! Then I would sit up and listen to your ghost story." 

Johnson considered what kind of person you really wouldn't want to come back from the dead—and almost immediately she thought of Jack the Ripper, the infamous serial killer who terrorized London in the late 1880s. Once she had her idea, Johnson was off and running. 

The first novel in a planned trilogy, The Name of the Star is inventive, fast-paced and compelling. We meet plucky Louisiana teen Aurora "Rory" Deveaux as she arrives at Wexford, an elite boarding school in London. There has been disturbing news of a local murder, but Rory is too consumed with adjusting to life at Wexford to focus on the slaying. She quickly makes friends with her roommate, Jazza, and starts a flirtation with Jerome, one of the class prefects. Things seem to be going well for Rory—until another woman turns up dead behind a local pub, and police fear they have a Jack the Ripper copycat on their hands. 

Johnson says the historical material surrounding the Ripper crimes provided the obvious structure for her story. "I wanted the book to be heavier on the school stuff in the beginning so you would think it was going to be more of a school story," she explains. "I wanted Rory to get taken out of that world, that you have some idea that her life had been normal—and now it isn't."

Normality ends for Rory on the night she sees a suspicious man in the Wexford quad hours before another murder takes place nearby—a man no one else saw. With the guidance of a mysterious new roommate, Rory realizes that she has the ability to see ghosts, and that she just might be the ghost killer's next victim. Luckily Rory isn't alone in her struggle—she learns there is a secret ghost police force tracking the killer along with the London police, but she certainly can't admit that to any of her friends. And so Rory goes from being a typical high school student to a teen on the run from what she thought she knew about herself, the world and the dark forces working against her.

To say much more would ruin the fun of reading Johnson's spooky novel, but teen readers with an interest in history, mystery and supernatural stories will find much to savor in The Name of the Star. 

Johnson says she wanted Rory to come from a town near New Orleans because the Crescent City "has a long history of very eccentric behavior." With a laugh, she explains, "Some of the most interesting people I have ever met come from New Orleans. And I wanted Rory to have an interesting background. Her family is loosely based on my own family and neighbors, except I think that mine are probably weirder. So Rory is in many ways a filter for me to talk about my relatives." 

Whether she's channeling her own relatives or not, what's most striking about Johnson's writing is her ability to completely inhabit her characters' voices. Rory, Jazza, Jerome and their friends leap off the page, and readers will be continuously surprised and entertained by their misadventures. About writing from the teen perspective, Johnson admits, "It's not that I have a particularly teenage mindset. The only thing I do is try to think, what would this be like if you haven't done it before? The main thing that's different about being a teenager is that you're experiencing a lot of things for the first time—that's the most important logic."

When asked what Rory will experience in the second book, slated for release in fall 2012, Johnson will only say, "Rory is having to cope with the aftermath of all the things that happened to her. Sometimes in supernatural stories you don't give people enough time to have the complete nervous breakdown. So she's in therapy, but she can't talk about what really happened, so therapy's a joke. Rory has a complicated life. And things are going to get more complicated."

Luckily, complications—in Johnson's capable and creative hands—are something to eagerly anticipate.

 

More with Maureen Johnson:

A clever, scary, little-bit-sexy beginning to a series that takes Louisiana teen Rory to London.

Rory's parents are teaching for a year at the University of Bristol, so she gets to spend senior year at Wexford, a London boarding school. She recounts her story, from mining her colorful relatives for stories to wow her English classmates, coming to grips with heavier course loads and making a couple of fairly adorable friends. But London is soon caught up in fear, as a copycat killer has begun recreating Jack the Ripper's bloody murders in gruesome detail. Johnson fearlessly takes readers from what seems like a cool innocent-abroad-with-iPod story to supernatural thriller, when Rory sees a man no one else does on campus the night of one of those murders. Enter a trio of young folks who are ghost hunters of a very specific sort. The tension ramps up exquisitely among cups of tea, library visits and the London Underground. The explosive ending is genuinely terrifying but never loses the wit, verve and humor that Rory carries with her throughout. While this tale does conclude, it does so with a complicated revelation that will have readers madly eager for the next installment.

Nice touches about friendship, kissing, research and the way a boy's curls might touch his collar fully integrate with a clear-eyed look at a pitiless killer. (Supernatural thriller. 12-18)

Johnson's trademark sense of humor serves to counterbalance some grisly murders in this page-turner, which opens her Shades of London series. Rory Deveaux trades the sultry heat of Louisiana for the academic rigors of a London boarding school, only to arrive in the middle of a spate of murders that echo those committed by Jack the Ripper. As one mutilated body after another turns up, Johnson (Scarlett Fever) amplifies the story's mysteries with smart use of and subtle commentary on modern media shenanigans and London's infamously extensive surveillance network. With the sordidness of Criminal Minds and the goofiness of Ghostbusters, it's a fresh paranormal story. Rory is a protagonist with confidence and a quick wit, and her new friends are well-developed and distinctive—both the "normal" ones and those who, like Rory, can see ghosts—and Wexford, Rory's new school, is an appropriately atmospheric backdrop to this serial murder mystery. Rory's budding romance with a classmate takes a backseat to more pressing (and deadly) concerns, but readers looking for nonstop fun, action, and a little gore have come to the right place. Ages 12–up. (Sept.)

Gr 7 Up—Rory, 17, leaves rural Louisiana and enrolls in a British boarding school. Her arrival coincides with the emergence of a new terror in London: a murderer mimicking the 1888 grisly killings by Jack the Ripper. As she reports to officials her knowledge of events leading up to these gruesome deaths, she reaches the startling realization the she can see individuals not observed by others or picked up with electronic surveillance: Rory can see ghosts. She recognizes the one who poses as a modern-day Ripper and who is responsible for the horrific murders spreading across London. His plan intensifies and Rory becomes his target, with an announcement that the killings will continue until she surrenders to him. Employing a terminus, a device used to eliminate lingering ghosts, and a few friends who, like Rory, possess "the sight," she goes deep into the London underground to "terminate" this modern-day Ripper. While she is successful, there is obviously more to tell in this planned trilogy. This savvy teen, who uses her considerable smarts and powers against the ghosts, will return to battle all who haunt her world. Johnson uses a deft hand, applying the right amount of romance and teen snarkiness to relieve the story's building tension. Departing from her previous works, she turns paranormal on its head, mocking vampires and werewolves while creating ghosts that are both realistic and creepy. A real page-turner.—Barbara M. Moon, Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY