As they uncover further evidence, the police realize that Harvey is a serial killer. In 1981, a detective in Connecticut links the charm to Susie's murder and calls Fenerman. That fall, a hunter in Connecticut discovers the body of another one of Harvey's victims, and one of Susie's charms nearby. A year later the police bulldoze the cornfield and turn up a soda bottle from the night of the murder with Harvey's and Susie's fingerprints, finally making him an official suspect. Sensing threat, Harvey leaves Norristown as soon as possible and becomes a drifter. Still suspicious, Lindsey sneaks into Harvey's house and finds a drawing of the pit and is forced to leave when Harvey returns prematurely. As a result her mother, Grandma Lynn, moves into the Salmons' home to help her son-in-law care for Buckley and Lindsey. The following summer Abigail leaves her husband, going to her father's old cabin in New Hampshire and then moving to California, taking a job at a winery. In the wake of this, his wife Abigail begins having an affair with Fenerman, who is a widower. As a result he has to have knee replacement surgery. Brian and Jack struggle and Jack is struck with the bat. It turns out to be Susie's best friend, Clarissa, and her boyfriend Brian looking for a place to make out. Believing it to be Harvey returning to destroy evidence, he runs out to confront him with a baseball bat. That night in his study, Jack looks out the window and sees a flashlight in the cornfield. One day late in the summer a detective named Len Fenerman comes to tell the Salmons that the police have exhausted all leads and are dropping the investigation. Buckley, the youngest child in the family of four, tries to make sense of all this as he starts school.
Jack, consumed with guilt over not having been able to protect his daughter, remains on extended leave from work and increasingly isolates himself at home. Susie's sister Lindsey comes to share these suspicions. Jack, Susie's father, becomes suspicious and later comes to harass the police about Harvey.
Harvey find him odd but see no reason to suspect him. The Salmon family is at first reluctant to accept that Susie has been killed, but then accedes when Susie's hat and elbow are found. Meanwhile, Susie's spirit flees toward her personal heaven. An elbow, the only part of Susie ever to be found, falls out of his bag as he returns home, disposing of the remaining parts of the body by putting them in a safe and paying someone to drop it. Once she enters, he rapes her, stabs her to death, then he cuts her body into parts which are later dumped in a sinkhole. He persuades her to enter an underground den he has recently built nearby. She is accosted by a neighbor, George Harvey, a man in his mid-30s who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living. On Decemin Norristown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, Susie Salmon takes a shortcut home from school. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The novel's title stems from a line towards the end of the novel, in which Susie ponders her friends' and family's newfound strength after her death: These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. She sometimes becomes angry and frustrated from the choices her family makes while looking over them. Over the next few years she watches from a personalized heaven as her family and friends deal with their grief.
In 1973, a 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon is raped, murdered, and dismembered by a neighbor. The novel received a great deal of critical praise and became an instant bestseller.Ī film adaptation of the novel is currently in production and is being directed by Peter Jackson, who personally purchased the rights. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being brutally raped and murdered, watches from heaven as her family and friends go on with their lives, while she herself comes to terms with her own death.
"The Lovely Bones" is a 2002 novel by Alice Sebold. Media_type = Print ( Hardback and Paperback) audio book Cover_artist = Yoori Kim (design) Daniel Lee (photo-illustration)