Look for Me by Moonlight

In Mary Downing Hahn's 'Look for Me by Moonlight,' 16-year-old Cynda moves to a remote Maine inn run by her estranged father and his new, pregnant wife. Feeling like an outsider, she's drawn to the charismatic Victor Morthanos, who seems to understand her feelings of jealousy and resentment. However, Victor harbors a dark secret, and Cynda soon discovers he is a vampire, responsible for a past murder at the inn and now targeting her and her young half-brother. The book explores themes of loneliness, family dynamics, and the psychological allure of danger, culminating in Cynda's fight for survival and self-discovery. It's a suspenseful supernatural thriller with gothic undertones, suitable for middle grade to early young adult readers.

A lonely teenage girl, an isolated inn by the ocean, a ghost, a mysterious stranger-sure, these are gothic cliches, but in Hahn's (Stepping on the Cracks) able hands, they add up to a stylish supernatural thriller. Cynda, the 16-year-old narrator, has trepidations about moving in with her estranged father and his much younger wife at the Maine inn that they run even before she hears that the inn is haunted, ostensibly by the ghost of a young woman murdered some 60 years ago. Soon after her arrival, handsome, sophisticated Victor Morthanos checks in for a month-long stay. Cynda's five-year-old half-brother, Todd, hates him on sight, but Cynda just as quickly falls in love: Victor alone understands her jealousy and resentment of Todd and her stepmother, and he alone truly appreciates her. By the time Cynda figures out that Victor is a vampire and the murderer of the ghostly girl, she is well on the way to becoming a ghost herself, as is Todd. How Cynda overcomes her thralldom makes for a deliciously spine-tingling story-all the more gripping for its sturdy psychological underpinnings.