The Phantom Isles by Stephen Alter

When three middle school friend, Ming, Orion, and Courtney slip into the Carville, Massachusetts, Public Library one night through an open window, their mission is to investigate an intriguing book, The Compleat Necromancer, which Ming had located earlier, one which foretold that three friends would use its incantation to reveal spirits. In the basement stacks of the darkened library the three read the spell by the waning light of their nearly spent flashlight. When nothing seems to happen, the three hurriedly return the book to the shelf, and grumbling that they never believed in ghosts anyway, they make their escape.

But when librarian Alma Parker finds the book upside down on the shelf the next morning and opens it, she can't believe what she sees:

She was about to close the book and return it to its proper place on the place when something made her cry out. Alma had never screamed in her life, and certainly not in the library, but this was the loudest, most frightened sound she had ever made.

Between the pages of the book, she saw the profile of a boy's face. The words were still there, printed on the pages, but hovering just above them, like a filmy, translucent layer, was an unmistakable image, as if traced in the air.... Unlike a photograph, the image moved and he face turned to look at her. His eyes were a distant gray color, like smoke, and Alma felt certain he could see her too.

Still intrigued by the mysterious book, one of many donated by Hezikiah Osgood, now deceased and survived only by his elderly son Nick, the children make the distant Indian Ocean islands, the Ihlas dos Fastasmas, where the book was written, their assigned social studies project. As they do their research in the library, they too discover ghostly images seemingly trapped inside other books left by Osgood.

When Alma Parker finds the children gathering the donated books, she realizes that they, too, have seen the mysterious images of the trapped spirits and together they set out to learn the secrets which will release the phantom spirits to return to their island home. Research into the convoluted writings of Hezikiah Osgood and a visit to his elderly son, who now speaks only in a strange, backward version of English, begins to shed some light on the mystery, and together with their open-minded town librarian Ming, Orion, and Courtney unravel Osgood's secrets and determine how to use modern technology to reverse the force which binds the spirits inside the dusty old tomes.

A very different ghost tale, more atmospheric than spooky, which allows the personal stories of its very real ghostly spirits to emerge, this is a complex little novel which middle readers will find intriguing and hard to put down. Fans of the three cerebral investigators in Blue Balliett's Chasing Vermeer, Wright 3, and the just published Calder Game or John Bellairs' fantasy mysteries such as The House With a Clock In Its Walls (Lewis Barnavelt), will find Stephen Alter's The Phantom Isles very much to their taste.