Anna Dressed in Blood

Cas Lowood is seventeen and kills ghosts for a living. The work came down from his father, who was killed by a vengeful spirit, and Cas now carries his father's ritual athame. He travels the country with his mother, a witch, and a cat that senses the dead.

His newest job takes him to Thunder Bay, Ontario. A girl murdered in 1958 haunts her old Victorian house there, and everyone who has entered it has died. Locals call her Anna Dressed in Blood.

Cas expects a routine hunt. Anna turns out to be unlike any ghost he has met, and she lets him live. While he settles in with the friends he makes at school and pieces together what happened to her, the roles of hunter and prey start to blur.

A sardonic narrator tells this teen horror novel, and the plot moves fast and stays dark. A slow-growing romance with a dead girl runs through it. It opens the Anna duology, which continues with Girl of Nightmares. The question that drives it is whether Cas can still do his job once he knows Anna's story.