Happy People Don’t Live Here

In Sparks’s playful debut novel (after the collection And I Do Not Forgive You), a nomadic mother and daughter find solace among the oddball neighbors and ghosts of their new apartment complex, which was formerly a sanatorium. Alice, who “had always made art and had never considered herself an artist,” earns a tenuous living from commissions for her miniature houses. She’s fiercely protective of her precocious 10-year-old daughter, Fern, and grows worried when Fern insists she saw a dead body in the dumpster outside their building in exurban Minnesota, and that she can sense ghosts all around her. The plot thickens when one of those ghosts manifests as a talkative young con artist from the 1920s. As Fern seeks answers about the dead body, she and Alice make friends with their quirky neighbors, including their building manager who’s skilled in taxidermy, a woman who dresses as a mermaid, a prize-winning novelist, and a kindhearted history professor. The zaniness can sometimes feel forced, and a few of the novel’s many threads are left dangling at the end, but beneath the spunky girl detective plot is a finely crafted novel about fraught relationships, both between a mother and daughter and between the living and the dead. It’s a cozy supernatural delight. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (Oct.)