Stephanie Campisi’s The Unfinished Business: A Cosy Ghost Story

Horror’s gentlest dialect: a ghost story about loving the dead enough to let them go.

A dead kitchenhand still hunting for a lost recipe, a woman who keeps a shop called The Unfinished Business, and a girl who talks to ghosts nobody believes she can see. Stephanie Campisi’s The Unfinished Business is a cosy middle-grade ghost story that wears its spookiness lightly and its heart openly. This is middle-grade horror at its gentlest, a ghost story for kids built around grief, found family, and the hard, brave work of letting go. I read it expecting whimsy. I got that, and a quiet ache I did not see coming. Here is why it works.

The Unfinished Business | Stephanie Campisi | Fitzroy Books | March 2026 |

Felix the kitchenhand has been dead for fifty-seven years. He is still rooting through the pantry of a patisserie that has not even opened yet. He is looking for a chocolate gateau recipe he lost somewhere around the Cold War. He is the first ghost you meet in Stephanie Campisi’s The Unfinished Business, and he sets the rules of the book before you know the rules are being set. The dead do not haunt this town to scare anyone. They stay because they forgot where they put something, or said the wrong thing, or never got to finish a song. They are just like the living, with less time pressure and worse luck.

That is the trick Campisi pulls off, and she pulls it off early.

This is a ghost story you can read with the lights on, and I mean that as high praise. It does not go for the throat. It goes for the warm, anxious spot under your ribs. That is where you keep the people you have lost and the things you never said to them. The dread is gentle and almost homely. Nobody leaps out at you. But something builds as you read, a soft pressure, a sense that grief has weight even when it wears a cat costume and cracks jokes.

The early chapters move at the pace of a slow Sunday in a fussy little town. Dari Glenn watches Felix search the kitchen for the seventeenth time that day. Her mother Celine frets over espresso and shop doors and the Heritage Board. It is funny. It is also quietly sad. Dari has learned to live with the dead the way other kids learn to live with a bad knee. You just work around it.

Then Maude Mauffersette falls down the stairs.

Campisi does this with a flick of dark comedy so light you almost miss the floor coming up. One moment Maude is offering Dari a job and warning her that life might get in the way. The next she is falling, and wondering whether it is too late to sue the Heritage Board over the lack of non-slip step covers. The death is a punchline and a turning point at once. From there the book’s engine kicks in. Dari can see ghosts. Maude is now a ghost. Maude has a backlog of local spirits who need their business finished before she can rest. The plot hands itself to you, and it is a pleasure to take.

What the book does to your nerves is closer to comfort than terror. It loosens you. The tension is real, but it is the tension of wanting these stuck souls to get unstuck. You want Dari to stop hiding in janitors’ cupboards and let someone in.

The voice owes a clear debt to the dry, mock-formal narrator of Lemony Snicket, and Campisi knows it. She leans in. The narrator drops a straight-faced aside, then circles back to pop it. Take the moment when Maude makes what the book calls a “clearly portentous statement.” The narrator says you would think that after all her years on earth Maude would have learned not to make such remarks. Then it adds that she had a flair for the dramatic, and it had always served her well, even in death. The joke and the warning land in one breath. That is hard, and she makes it look easy.

The point of view is doing something sneaky, too. It sits close to Dari, then pulls back to follow Felix into a cupboard or Maude down the stairs. That roaming view lets the book hold two things at once. It shows the loneliness of a girl nobody believes. It also shows the busy, funny afterlife around her that only she can see. We get her loneliness and the proof that she is not alone. The form carries the theme.

The dialogue earns its keep, and Mr. Berezhin earns it most. The orchestra director can speak at only one volume, fortissimo. He compares a badly tuned orchestra to fingernails on a blackboard, if the fingernails belonged to a person being murdered very slowly with toothpicks. He gets to be that grim because he is so plainly kind beneath it. He says sorry to the photo of his late wife Katarina before he barrels into his next rant. Campisi builds her funniest character on top of his own quiet grief. Look closely and nearly everyone here is grieving someone. The jokes are how they keep standing.

Chapters are short. They end on small hooks rather than cliffhangers, which suits the cozy tone. The book never rushes a child toward fear. It walks them, hand held, into a building named The Unfinished Business, a place “scarcely a building at all,” an “architectural ghost” wedged between a cake shop and a record shop. Even the setting is an image that will not sit still.

Under the wax fruit and the floofy cat, this is a book about how we carry the dead. It is also about a certain kind of childhood loneliness.

Dari sees ghosts. The adults around her read that gift as damage. The school counsellor signs her up for orchestra so she might make friends. Celine worries, gently and not so gently, that they do not want “the whole Uncle Ed business all over again.” Uncle Ed is the relative who believed angels spoke to him through his toothbrush and now lives in a care home. Childhood doctors have filed Dari’s ghost-talking under trauma, tied to the way her father vanished. So the ghost premise doubles as a sharp, kind portrait of a kid. Her way of seeing the world gets treated as a sickness by the people who love her.

Dari’s father left and did not come back, and the word she trusts least is “soon.” Soon was when the bus should come, when dinner would be ready, when her father was meant to return from the northern boroughs. Soon, she has decided, ranges from much later than planned to not at all. A whole childhood of letdowns lives in that one word, and Campisi trusts young readers to feel it without spelling it out.

The ghosts give the theme its shape. Each one is stuck on something unfinished, a recipe, a song, a catch never made. Finishing their business means letting them go. Dari’s deepest wound is a person who left without finishing anything. So helping the dead move on is the hardest possible work for her. The book teaches Dari, and the reader, that loving someone and releasing them are not opposites. Letting go is not the same as not caring.

That lands hard for a middle-grade reader, where grief is often handled with oven mitts or skipped entirely. Campisi treats kids as people who already know loss. They have lost grandparents and pets and the version of a parent they used to have. She gives them a story where the dead are funny and fond and within reach, and where the goal, in the end, is the bravest thing of all. The goal is to say goodbye well.

There is a real-world echo in how the town treats difference, too. This is a place run by a Heritage Board so allergic to the present that it polices the look of a shop door. Into that stiffness walks a girl who talks to the air, and a woman, Maude, branded “Mad Maude” by neighbours who decided long ago what she was. The book quietly takes the side of the weird ones, the ones who see more. It tells its readers that being the odd kid in a town of rule-followers might mean you are the one who notices what everyone else walks past.

The humour is front and centre. Now it sits on top of real grief, and the magic carries weight her lighter work does not have to. In an interview around the book’s release, Campisi said she starts a project with a title or a theme, then the ending she is writing toward. You can feel that here. Everything points at the goodbye. The whole machine is built to earn one quiet act of letting go, and it does.

This belongs to the cozy, spooky middle-grade tradition, the gentle end of horror for young readers. It is one of the surest I have read. The clear neighbours are the two comps the jacket invites: Neil Gaiman‘s Coraline and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. From Coraline it takes the idea that a child can walk calmly into the strange and treat it as a problem to solve. From Snicket it takes the arch, funny, old-school narrator and the nerve to let dark things be witty.

Kids want spooky stories that respect their sadness, that use ghosts to talk about death honestly instead of for show. The Unfinished Business does exactly that. It does it with a cat called Hijinx, a tuba, and a cake shop. That it can be this funny and this true at once is what sets it apart.

Campisi understands the quiet trick at the centre of every ghost story, that the dead linger because the living have not yet learned to let them leave. She has written a book brave enough to hand a grieving kid the door, and gentle enough to let her decide when to walk through it.

The Unfinished Business: Book One by Stephanie Campisi

When Dari Glenn’ s eccentric neighbor Maude, owner of The Unfinished Business, meets an untimely end, Dari’ s ability to communicate with ghosts goes from being a family embarrassment to a surprising gift.

Maude, back in fine ghostly form, has some unfinished business of her own that she needs Dari’ s help with: the myriad local spirits who must be ” finished” before Maude can rest in hard-earned peace.

But handling the unfinished business of others proves no easy task— especially when Dari has ghosts of her own to deal with. As Dari navigates the world of the living and the dead, she realizes that sometimes, letting go of the past is the hardest business of all.

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