Reunion recap

Four teenagers from a neighboring school died when their car went off the coast highway, and Suze Simon discovers that all four are still here and have decided to kill the driver of the other car: Michael Meducci, a quiet classmate who survived the crash. Suze puts herself between them and protects him through escalating attacks, including an attempt to drown him at a party. Father Dominic wants the four talked down and Jesse wants Suze to stay out of it entirely, but the ghosts cannot be reasoned with, so Suze prepares an exorcism and performs it at the cliffs where they died, nearly dying herself. The four are driven out and Michael is safe. Only afterward does Suze learn that Michael caused the crash on purpose, to avenge his younger sister, who never recovered from what the four had done to her. Suze has spent the whole case defending the person the ghosts were right to blame.

Susannah Simon is a mediator: she can see and speak with the dead, and ghosts with unfinished business come to her whether she wants them or not. She has kept it from her mother her whole life. When her mother remarried, Suze moved from Brooklyn to Carmel-by-the-Sea, into a house her stepfather Andy is restoring, with three stepbrothers she privately calls Sleepy, Dopey and Doc. The bedroom she was given came with Jesse, the ghost of a young man who died there in the nineteenth century and who has never explained why he stayed; he has become her closest confidant and something more complicated than that. At the Junipero Serra Mission Academy she discovered that the principal, Father Dominic, is a mediator too, and the two have worked together ever since, disagreeing about nearly everything: he reasons with the dead, she fights them. Suze has already driven a violent ghost out of the school, and has carried a dead woman's message into the affairs of a wealthy local family. Both cases left her with injuries she had to account for at home.

Four teenagers from a nearby private school died when their car went off the coast highway, and the town still mourns them as the RLS Angels. Suze discovers that all four are still here, and that they have settled on the driver of the other car as the person responsible: Michael Meducci, a quiet, unpopular junior at her own school, who survived. The four have already started making his life dangerous. Michael is frightened and withdrawn, cannot see them, and has no idea why everything around him keeps going wrong. Suze, who can see them, puts herself in the way. Father Dominic wants the four counseled and Jesse wants Suze nowhere near them, but the ghosts have no interest in being talked to, and their attacks on Michael are escalating from harassment toward something that will kill him.

Suze looks into the crash properly, with CeeCee's appetite for back issues and local history doing most of the work, and finds the official account thinner than she expected. Michael, grateful and lonely, develops an obvious attachment to her that she has no idea how to handle. At a party at Kelly Prescott's house the four hold him under the water of the swimming pool, and Suze gets him out in front of a crowd who see only a boy who nearly drowned. The ghosts are growing stronger and less careful, and it is clear they will not stop at Michael: anyone protecting him is fair game, and Suze is now firmly in that category.

The campaign against Michael becomes a sustained attempt on his life, and Suze is caught in it more than once. Attempts to reason with the four go nowhere; they are certain of their grievance and unmoved by being told they are dead. Suze begins preparing to exorcise all four, which means performing the rite where they died, on the cliffs above the coast road, and Jesse argues hard against her going anywhere near it. Around this, ordinary life carries on demanding her attention, and so does Michael, whose gratitude has become an attachment she has no idea how to manage.

Suze goes to the cliffs and carries out the exorcism. The confrontation is the most dangerous she has been in and comes very close to killing her, but all four are forced out and do not come back. Michael is no longer in danger, the town's ghosts of the year are gone, and Suze goes home injured again and lets her family believe the usual story. Father Dominic, who wanted the four counseled rather than driven out, is not pleased with how it was settled, and Jesse is not pleased that she went alone.

The truth comes out after the ghosts are gone. Michael did not lose control of his car on the coast road. He ran the four off it deliberately, in revenge for what they had done to his younger sister, who never recovered from it. The RLS Angels had been right about who was responsible for their deaths and wrong only in believing it was an accident, which means Suze spent the entire case protecting their killer and driving out the people he killed. Michael is free of them and faces nothing for what he did. Suze is left holding the knowledge, without proof and without a course of action, and considerably less certain than Father Dominic that she can tell which side of a haunting deserves her help.

Suze exorcises the four RLS Angels at the cliffs where they died, coming close to being killed doing it, and the campaign against Michael Meducci ends. Afterward she learns what the case actually was. Michael did not lose control of his car. He forced the four off the road deliberately, in revenge for what they had done to his younger sister, who never recovered from it. The teenagers Suze spent the book driving out had been right about who killed them, and wrong only in thinking it was carelessness. Michael is left free of them and unpunished, and Suze is left knowing it, with nothing she can usefully do about it. Father Dominic's insistence that the dead be reasoned with rather than fought has taken another blow, and so has Suze's confidence in her own judgement about who in a haunting is the victim. Nothing about her situation at home or at school has changed, and Jesse is still in her room, with her feelings about him harder to explain away than they were.