Kehret takes care to create a setting that could be anywhere in small-town, middleclass contemporary America. The novel opens in a theme restaurant where waiters and family sing together to salute Ginger's thirteenth birthday, a scene most readers could picture in similar chain restaurants in their own neighborhoods. It is the very ordinariness of the home and school scenes that allow Kehret to develop the suspense of the story, as overtones of evil invade these very comfortable and familiar places.

The stalker confronts Ginger in the most banal settings: her own mailbox, the school bus stop, in the school parking lot. The cover art, showing a typical middle-schooler opening the school door, shadowed by a figure in a white compact car, emphasizes the fact that once-safe settings become places of fear in this novel.

Many scenes take place in Ginger's chaotic suburban home where she lives with two...