Stolarz, Laurie Faria, (2003). Blue is for Nightmares. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn. ISBN:0738703915. 283 pages.

Summary and Evaluation: What's worse that dreaming that your best friend is going to be murdered? Waking up, at 16, to find you've wet the bed. So begins Stacey's junior year at boarding school. She keeps having nightmares that her best friend and roommate, Drea, will die and then waking up to soiled sheets. Of course the two events are slightly linked and both get addressed through the course of the novel, but in the meantime, Drea keeps getting death lilies and people close to her keep getting cryptic notes in red block letters. It gets kinda creepy.

As Stolarz puts it at the end of the novel, Stacey is the "psychic friend"--a Wicca to be exact--and it takes all her skills in witchcraft to try to save her friend. Yes, that's right, the witch is the good kind. She uses the powers of magic and nature to help her answer questions about the mystery.

This book is fast paced and well plotted out. Stolarz has listened well to Chekov's advice (if you put a gun in the first act it has to go off in the third), making sure that many possible loose ends get tied. It's possible you can discover who the murderer is before Stacey does, but I didn't lose the thrill of watching her nab him nonetheless. I am not usually a fan of mystery novels but Stolarz has created such a fine group of characters that part of the fun of the read is just watching them interact inside the walls of their boarding school. I am curious to read the rest series White is for Magic, Silver is for Secrets, and Red is for Rememberance.

Booktalk: Because of the television show Medium, who also has visions that save lives and solve mysteries, I might talk about how Stacey is a bit like that character. Even if I didn't bring that television show into the picture, I think delving into a description of the main character might interest some readers.