Ghost Squad

Three St. Augustine cemeteries figure in the story: Huguenot, Tolomato, and St. Augustine Memorial. Each holds items, hidden long ago, that can help Lucely and Syd as they search for a way to stop the local invasion of evil spirits. The girls visit these graveyards in the dead of night when no one can interrupt them as they break into mausoleums and inspect them for clues. This adds a sense of creepy fear to the story, especially when scary ghosts rise up from the graves and threaten the girls.

Whenever bad ghosts appear, Lucely feels a distinct chill in the air. Even on warm, muggy evenings, she can sense the sudden temperature drop. At Tolomato Cemetery, “the hairs in her nose felt like tiny icicles” (189). Syd can sense it, too, and the firefly ghosts are strongly affected by the chill, which seems to weaken them. Chill is a device common to horror stories—it represents the coldness of death and the clammy atmosphere of a graveyard—and in the book, it augurs the sudden presence of pure evil.

The Luna family has lived in their house in St. Augustine for generations. Lucely is the newest member of the clan, and she and her father painted her bedroom a “seafoam blue, the color of her abuela’s house in the Dominican Republic” (3). On the ceiling are stickers that shine at night like stars: They symbolize Lucely’s connection to the glowing fireflies that contain her ghost relatives, and they also represent a sense of the magical that hovers over the girl’s life. Simon Luna’s financial problems put the place in danger of foreclosure, and Lucely determines to do whatever she can to save it. The house is the only home Lucely has known, and to her, it represents tradition, close connections, and the warmth of a loving family.

Lucely finds an ancient notebook filled with handwritten recipes for magical spells. She and Syd figure out that this is the long-lost El Libro de Lobos that contains a curse to bring back the evil dead and a counter-spell to stop it. The antidote is on a page torn out and hidden, and the girls search many graves before they find it. The book represents the awesome power of the witches of the Purple Coven, and it’s the source of both of the girls’ biggest mistake—they invoke evil spirits bent on taking over St. Augustine—and the cure for it. The book becomes the principal quest item of the story, and it drives much of the action in the plot.