Childhood ghost follows across the oceans, and mayhem erupts

Amanda Jayatissa Loot.co.za (R388) BERKLEY

MY Sweet Girl is a terrifying and twisty tale laced with secrets and otherworldly horror.

The book begins in present-day San Francisco where 30-year-old Paloma Evans, who blacks out when drunk, has just discovered her flat mate, Arun, dead at the kitchen table. Paloma has just returned from the bank where she attempted unsuccessfully to withdraw funds because Arun was blackmailing her. He'd discovered the devastating secret Paloma's been hiding for 18 years, ever since a white American couple adopted her from an orphanage in Ratmalana, Sri Lanka.

More frightening than Arun's bloody corpse is the horrifying presence Paloma senses in her flat. Paloma has spent years trying to convince herself Mohini isn't real even though girls in the orphanage swore they saw the spectre roaming at night. Yet, here she is. “It was just for a second. A fraction of a second, but I knew. I knew she was back. Her black hair, her pale face. All these years I had spent trying to convince myself that she didn't exist, that she was a ghost from my childhood, just a product of an overactive imagination, and now here she was.”

When Arun's corpse disappears before the police arrive, she's not sure if she hallucinated the event or if she'd walked into a murder scene.

The novel smoothly segues between adult Paloma's narration in the present and her 12-year-old self recounting her life at the Little Miracles Girls' Home in Sri Lanka. Might one – or both – of these narrations be unreliable?