TRACING DARK LINES: In Lisa Unger's "Ink and Bone," college student Finley Montgomery reluctantly embraces her psychic abilities. A family is in need, after all.

Finley Montgomery has a gift she wishes she could turn down.

The protagonist of Lisa Unger's new paranormal thriller, Ink and Bone, is a 20-year-old college student who would like nothing better than to just go to class, ride her purple Harley Sportster and hang out with her sometime boyfriend, Rainer.

But when Finley wakes up hearing an incessant "squeak-clink" noise in her head, she knows it's no ordinary earworm. Someone is trying to reach her, and that someone is probably in trouble.

Bestselling author Unger, who lives in Clearwater, has set several of her previous 13 novels in a fictional small town somewhere north of New York City. The Hollows, as she calls it, has over the years become more than the usual mystery-tale backdrop. Although charming at first glance, the town seems to have a mysterious mind of its own.

In previous books set there, two characters have played main roles: Jones Cooper, a stalwart lawman, now retired and working as a private investigator, and Eloise Montgomery, Finley's grandmother, a psychic with whom Jones sometimes works...