• Age: 9 to 13
• Grade: 4 to 8

Thirteen-year-old October Schwartz is new in town, short on friends, and the child of a clinically depressed science teacher. Naturally, she spends most of her time in the Sticksville Cemetery, which just happens to border her backyard. And that backyard just happens to be the home of five dead teenagers, each from a different era of the past: there’s the dead United Empire Loyalist! The dead escaped slave who made her way north via the Underground Railroad! The dead quintuplet!

Soon, October befriends the five dead kids. Together — using October’s smarts and the dead kids’ abilities to walk through walls and get around undetected and stuff — they form The Dead Kid Detective Agency, committed to solving Sticksville’s most mysterious mysteries. October’s like Nancy Drew, if she’d hung out with corpses.

When Sticksville Central High School’s beloved French teacher dies in a suspicious car accident, it provides the agency with its first bona fide case. Soon October and her five dead friends find themselves in the midst of a nefarious murder plot, thick with car chases, cafeteria fights, sociopathic math teachers, real estate appointments, and a wacky adventure that might uncover the truth about a bomb that exploded almost 40 years ago.

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MICHELLE MONTEITH is an award-winning actor based in Toronto. She has appeared in critically acclaimed off-Broadway runs of Spoon River and Of Human Bondage. Her other plays include: The Heidi Chronicles, Eurydice, Angels in America, Ghosts, Parfumerie, Picture This (Soulpepper), The Lesson (Modern Times), Butcher (ATP, Why Not Theatre, Theatre Centre), Ubuntu, Little One, Waiting Room, Generous, The Valley (Tarragon Theatre), The Russian Play (Factory Theatre), The Diary of Anne Frank (Neptune) The Glass Menagerie (Canadian Stage, Segal Ctr), Blasted (Buddies in Bad Times Theatre), The Mill (Theatrefront), Hamlet (NAC) Caesar and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost (Stratford). She is the co-creator of 2B theatre’s award-winning Revisited.

Montieth has worked in film and on the television series Haven, Bitten, and Saving Hope, among others, and voice acts for audiobooks, animation, and radio.

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“This book would really appeal to kids who enjoy fantasy, and a twist of the grim. The concept is pretty dark, but the book doesn’t go into too much gruesome detail. Even though October’s circumstances are not cheery, her high school experiences will be familiar to many kids.” — National Post