"You look younger than I'd have expected, Mr Moorcroft," said the Grim Reaper, tapping a bony finger on the desk. "With a file like this. But my eyes aren't what they used to be. No, back in the old days I could pick out a death-dodger at three miles in a heavy fog. Happy times, happy times..."

When fourteen year old Michigan Moorcroft, wakes up one morning to find that he's gone to the big skatepark in the sky after a three car freeway smash he thinks things couldn't get much worse. He's wrong.

Now he's finding out stuff about the afterlife that they didn't tell you in the manual - like the fact that there's school.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, Mich has to risk his eternal soul in a desperate tussle with a real live killer, hell bent on finishing off the rest of his family. Add to the mix an Easter Bunny with an attitude problem and a Supreme Being who'd rather be knitting, and you can see that life after death might be a little more complicated than advertised.

The question is: will Mich be sitting pretty when Judgement Day comes, or will he be just one more of Satan's Little Helpers?

A darkly comic vision of life after death, 'Michigan Moorcroft' is an ambitious first novel for young adults from Martin Chatterton. "I couldn't put it down." Garth Nix "Really gets you on the edge of your seat." Book Review Magazine

Scholastic Books 2003

available online from amazon.co.uk or at scholastic.co.uk