A fourteen year old girl named Susie Salmon is raped and then murdered by her neighbour unbeknownst to her family on December 6th, 1973. She has her curiosity piqued – as that is of her nature - by the middle-aged man and she is lured into an underground shelter of his creation, in the cornfield that served as a shortcut to her Pennsylvania home. Her mother and father are quick to report her missing to the local police, struck by fear while Susie rises to what she will eventually discover to be her personal heaven. She is able to see glimpses of her past and what occurs within the living’s (those whom were impacted by her death i.e. her family, her crush Ray and a lesbian girl named Ruth) plane of existence through the scenery that unfolds within her heaven. She is, days into the investigation, later presumed to be dead. …show more content…
Further investigation, led by detective Len Fenerman, fails to unravel the mystery behind Susie Solomon’s presumed murder. Her father has folded under the pressure of catching his daughter’s killer, framing their neighbour Harvey (after having experienced an encounter with her ghost) despite both the detective’s and his wife’s dissuasions. His wife has become more detached, distant as she begins a sexual affair with Detective Fenerman after an associated incident that leads to her husband being hospitalized. Lindsey is influenced by her father to take things into her own hands and sneaks into her neighbour’s house in search of evidence that can connect him to the murder. She learns that he is not only guilty of the murder of her sister, but has other