Litani is the fourth book I have read by author Jess Lourey (Unspeakable Things, Bloodline, The Quarry Girls) and it’s a corker.

Fourteen-year-old Francesca “Frankie” Jubilee has just arrived in Litani, Minnesota to live with her mother, Linda, whom she hasn’t seen in seven years. She’d had no choice in the matter; her much loved father has died and Frankie has no place left to go but back to the town where her parents grew up and where her mother is currently a Carver County prosecutor.

Litani, population 2700, has a downtown comprised of “two square blocks of shops and offices anchored by Engle Brewery […] all bloodred brick and gaping windows clinging to knives of broken glass.” Litani is “ghost-quiet […] rows of windows staring […] like vacant eyes.”

After Frankie gets beat up in the woods by three younger girls she meets Crane, a teenager a couple years older than her, who warns her that she “shouldn’t go into the woods at all.”

Litani is set in the 1980s (with all the requisite allusions) at the height of the Satanic Panic. Something is clearly up in Litani, that’s for sure, and Frankie is smart and tenacious enough to want to get to the bottom of it, especially after one of her bullies disappears. Then there’s The Game, a vague and deeply unsettling threat that it seems many of the young kids in Litani are aware of.

Rumours abound, but Linda — who seems ambivalent about her daughter at the best of times– seems to be working towards prosecuting some bad actors and the reader is introduced to a laundry list of potential suspects.

There are some genuinely creepy moments in this book, and all done without one bit of graphic writing; it’s all lingering looks and paranoia and that tickle up the back of your neck. It is also a story about family and a coming-of-age story. I loved every single second.