Blur

The isolated town of Beldon, Wisconsin, is shocked when a high school freshman girl's body is found in Lake Algonquin early in the school year. Just like everyone else in the community, 16-year-old Daniel Byers, son of the town's sheriff, believes that Emily Jackson's drowning death was accidental. But at her funeral, he has a terrifying vision of her sitting up in the coffin and asking for his help. Overcome with a crippling headache, he collapses, while the murderer watches, hidden in the crowd of mourners. Later that week, after another macabre hallucination while quarterbacking during the homecoming football game, Daniel begins to think he's going insane. However, convinced that Emily's ?resurrection? was more than just a mere hallucination, Daniel and a girl from school uncover a series of clues that convince them Emily was murdered. Daniel asks for his father's help, telling him it's a murder, but the sheriff suspects that his son's hunches are just the result of his growing disconnect from reality. The obstacles mount as Daniel's difficulties distinguishing fantasy from reality become more and more pronounced. Soon, it becomes evident that his subconscious mind is synthesizing seemingly unrelated details from news articles and facts no one else notices, and then revealing the clues to Daniel through the grisly visions he's seeing and the whispered voices he continues to hear. When the real killer becomes aware of Daniel's suspicions of foul play, he plants evidence that leads the authorities, including Daniel's own father, to suspect that Daniel is the one responsible for Emily Jackson's death. Full of twists and turns, this mystery with a Hitchkockian flair will launch a trilogy of YA thrillers featuring Daniel Byers, an unlikely hero struggling to find the truth as he slips further and further into his own private blurred reality.