The Phantom Isles — Stephen Alter

It all begins with an old book called The Compleat Necromancer. According to the author -- a professor who once lived on an island known as Ilhas dos Fantasmas -- certain passages, when read aloud, can conjure up the dead.

That's just what friends Ming, Courtney, and Orion decide to do. First, they break into the town library late at night. Then, they find The Compleat Necromancer and recite the incantation from the book's yellowing pages.

Nothing happens. Or so they think. Because when the librarian, Alma Parker, opens the doors the next morning, she instantly knows that something is wrong. It isn't simply that a few books are not where they're supposed to be. It's that certain ones now include moving images -- faces that seem to float above the text, as if they are alive but somehow trapped within the pages . . .

Ghosts.

Ming, Orion, Courtney, and Alma are determined to free the ghosts. But to do so they must unravel the mystery of how the ghosts were trapped in the first place, and what the professor's experiments on the Ilhas dos Fantasmas have to do with it all. The professor's son seems the right person to ask. There's just one problem: he's a ghost now, too.