The Lovely Bones recap

Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into an underground hideout by her neighbor George Harvey and murdered. She narrates the rest from her own heaven, watching her Pennsylvania family come apart under the weight of her loss. Her father Jack becomes certain Harvey is the killer but cannot prove it; her mother Abigail pulls away and eventually leaves the family, drifting into an affair with the detective Len Fenerman and then to California. Her sister Lindsey breaks into Harvey's house and finds a drawing that confirms his guilt, but he senses the danger and slips out of town before he can be caught, uncaught for his crimes. Years pass and the family slowly heals: Jack's heart attack draws Abigail home, Lindsey builds a life with her partner Samuel, and Buckley grows up. Susie is granted one impossible wish when she briefly slips into the body of her classmate Ruth to be with the boy she loved, Ray. Long afterward, Harvey dies alone and unremembered when he falls into a ravine, and Susie finally lets go, wishing the living a long and happy life.

In December 1973, fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon is walking home through a cornfield in suburban Pennsylvania when her neighbor George Harvey coaxes her into an underground room he has secretly dug there and rapes and kills her. Susie tells all of this herself, speaking from a personal heaven where she can watch the living but cannot reach them. Her body is never found, though an elbow and other traces turn up, and the police confirm to her stunned parents, Jack and Abigail, that she is dead. The household collapses into shock and grief. Susie describes her strange new afterlife, the counselors and companions she meets there, and above all her helpless watching as the people she loves begin to absorb what has happened to her.

The Salmons sink into mourning while the investigation stalls for lack of a body or hard evidence. Detective Len Fenerman works the case and grows close to the family. Jack, unable to accept helplessness, fixes on the quiet neighbor George Harvey and becomes convinced he is the murderer, though he can prove nothing. Susie watches the classmates her death has marked: Ray Singh, the boy who nearly became her first kiss, and Ruth Connors, an odd, artistic girl whom Susie's spirit brushed as it left the earth and who becomes quietly haunted by her. Abigail, already restless before the tragedy, begins to withdraw from her husband and children, while Grandma Lynn arrives to help hold the house together. From above, Susie longs for the ordinary life she will never have.

Time moves on and the family's grief settles into different shapes. Jack's certainty about Harvey deepens into an obsession that frightens those around him and leads to a humiliating, dangerous misstep when he confronts the wrong figure in the dark. Abigail drifts further from the family and begins a private affair with Len Fenerman, the detective, seeking escape from the role of grieving mother. Lindsey grows into a strong, self-possessed teenager and finds first love with a classmate, Samuel Heckler, giving Susie the bittersweet pleasure of watching her sister step into experiences she herself was denied. Susie, meanwhile, keeps her attention on Harvey, learning more of what he is, while her family remains unable to touch him.

Lindsey takes matters into her own hands, breaking into Harvey's house while he is out and discovering a drawing of the underground room where Susie died, proof enough for the family of his guilt even if not for the courts. She barely escapes as he returns. Harvey, realizing the suspicion around him has hardened, quietly packs up and leaves town before the law can move, evading capture altogether. The family fractures further in these years: Abigail, unable to bear her life, leaves Jack and the children and goes to California to work and be alone, while Jack keeps the household going in her absence. Susie watches her mother's flight and her father's endurance, the loss now radiating outward into a slow, ongoing unmaking of the family she left.

Years pass and the Salmons begin, unevenly, to heal. Jack suffers a heart attack, and the crisis finally draws Abigail back home from California to face the family and marriage she abandoned. Lindsey and Buckley are nearly grown, shaped by the loss but going on with their lives, and Lindsey's bond with Samuel endures. Ruth Connors, still attuned to the dead, and Ray Singh return to the sinkhole near the old cornfield, a place tied to Susie. There Susie is granted a single impossible wish: she slips briefly from heaven into Ruth's body and, as Ruth, is finally with Ray, sharing the closeness and the first love her murder took from her. Watching her family draw back together and having touched the living one last time, Susie feels her grip on the earthly world begin to loosen.

George Harvey is never brought to justice by the law. Sensing that the Salmons are closing in after Lindsey finds his incriminating drawing, he abandons his house and drifts from place to place for years, continuing to prey on women. In the end his death is a matter of chance rather than punishment: while trying to lure another young woman, he is knocked off balance by a falling icicle and tumbles into a ravine, and his body lies undiscovered for weeks. The Salmons, meanwhile, come back together. Jack survives a heart attack that brings Abigail home after her years away, and the marriage tentatively mends. Lindsey grows up, settles with Samuel, and has a daughter she names for her lost sister; Buckley reaches adulthood carrying the family's grief. Susie is given one final, impossible gift, briefly entering Ruth Connors's body to share the love and the touch with Ray Singh that her murder had stolen. A charm from the bracelet Susie wore the day she died surfaces years later, a small sign that she is not forgotten. At the last, Susie releases her hold on the living, watching them go on without her, and wishes them long and happy lives.