Murray has had a tough life. He has no father, and a mother who's been arrested for prostitution, which results in him being bullied at school. His friends are all dead, which is why he spends hours in the cemetery talking to the graves.
Mr. Janochek is the cemetery caretaker. A lot of people would chase Murray away, recognizing that there was something strange about the boy, but Mr. Janochek sees a teen who is lonely.
Pearl is Mr. Janochek's daughter and close to Murray's age, but she's incredibly manipulative.
Gates is a cop who is obsessed with finding the high school girl who went missing a few weeks ago. He's pinning his hopes for information on Robert, a schizophrenic in drug recovery.
A YA paranormal murder mystery, this 2006 book is a little gem and it's a shame it isn't better known. ( )

This book pulled me both ways. I loved hearing the boy's and the detective's stories but the other people were a little boring or repetitive - I felt like just skipping over them strait to the characters' I liked. It is written very well, however, with each completely different character having their own voice and personality. ( )

I did not expect this book to bring tears to my eyes, but I've seen far too much death come far too soon. More than anything, I wish that I could communicate with the dead as Murray does in Dead Connection.
I thoroughly enjoyed the story. Murray makes for a great character, I really feel for him. His pain and loneliness seeps through the pages as he finds solace in the cemetery, escaping his home life through comforting those who died far too young.
Pearl and Robert, excuse me, Mister Robert Barry Compton also shine with wonderful character development. I found myself rooting for Robert and filled with pride as he started to remember things. Billup and Deputy Gates showed both sides of law-enforcement, the just and the ugly, which was refreshing.
Dead Connection was a novel with a little bit of everything in it; a good mystery, the drama of broken homes, and the coveted fantasy of clairvoyance. ( )

Booktalk: Murray Kiefer is a loner with a weird name and a disaster of a mother. His real friends are at the cemetery. He sits at their graves and listens to the dead tell him their stories, and they listen to him. But now he hears a new voice crying out, asking for help, asking to be found. While Murray tries to find out who is calling to him so desparately, Deputy Sheriff Gates is on his own quest, searching for a missing teenager, searching for a killer.

Dead Connection has a supernatural bent, but at it's heart it's a classic who-dun-it. Teenager Nikki Parker has disappeared, and while we know her ghost is crying out to be found, it's going to take some time to find her body, let along track down her killer.

Price tells this story through multiple (living) viewpoints, among them, Murray; Gates; Pearl, the daughter of the cemetery caretaker; and Mr. Robert Barry Compton, a psychotic/meth addict who may have valuable information. The constant switches in point-of-view could be confusing, but Price does a good job of giving the characters distinct voices, so it's easy to keep track of who is talking. The story moves forward in short passages - some only a page or so - which keep the pace moving quickly.

While the missing teenager take central place in the plot, there are other issues going on here. Murray's mother is a drunk and drug addict whose neglect is what drove him to the cemetery in the first place. And interestingly for a YA novel, several of the main characters are adults. We most closely get to know Deputy Gates, and see his struggle to investigate this crime in the wake of his own son's death. But Price also gives a strong voice to Officer Vern Billup, a drunk, abusive man whose relationship to the case is not immediately clear. This narrative technique adds to the complexity of the story, but teens may have a harder time finding a character to relate to. ( )

I did like this book, it had a little mystery as well as making you sympathyze with the main character of the book. It had a lot of twists and turns in it and I liked that, too. I guess the only thing that bothered me was how readily accepted the mother was by everyone in the town and nothing ever being done about it, but I guess if this is the only "quirk" I have, then that's not so bad. ( )