Tiffany D. Jackson has a gift for turning the most ordinary moments into stories that refuse to let go. The New York Times bestselling author—and 2026 Edgar Award winner for Best Juvenile for her middle-grade debut Blood in the Water—is back with Ghost in the Night, a highly anticipated, atmospheric murder mystery set beneath the moss-draped trees of Savannah, Georgia, America’s Most Haunted City.
In a warm, candid conversation with AMFM Magazine’s Paul Salfen, Jackson revealed how a single offhand joke over brunch with her editor sparked an entire novel, why Savannah’s haunted reputation proved irresistible, and the personal “Hail Mary” that launched her career.
Last summer, Blood in the Water debuted at #4 on the New York Times bestseller list and spent a total of ten weeks on it. This spring it claimed the Edgar. Now the “Queen of Thrillers” returns with twelve-year-old Harmony Roundtree, a girl still carrying the unresolved weight of her grandmother’s death. When her blues-musician father brings her to Savannah for the summer, Harmony has one non-negotiable request at every stop: a ghost tour. Desperate to prove that spirits are real—and that the people she loves are never truly gone—she and her new friends are pulled into a missing-persons case that quickly turns sinister. What begins as a search for ghosts exposes a tangled web of lies and secrets someone is willing to kill to keep hidden.
The idea arrived almost by accident. “It actually came from a funny conversation I was having with my editor,” Jackson told Salfen. “I was saying one of the favorite things to do when I visit a new city is go on a ghost tour… and I made a joke, and I said, well, usually I’m usually the only Black girl on the ghost tour. And my editor looked up, and she was like, hey, now that’s a story. And literally, a book was born from that conversation over brunch.”
Savannah itself became a character. “It’s one of the most haunted cities in the United States,” Jackson said. One of her favorite local legends involves a cab driver who picks up a passenger on River Street, is given an address that leads straight to the cemetery, and then discovers the passenger has vanished from the back seat. That sense of place—layered Black history, Gullah culture, and the city’s reputation for thrills and chills—saturates every page.
Critics have taken notice. Kirkus Reviews called it “an atmospheric, well-paced adventure exploring supernatural mysteries.” School Library Journal praised the “first-person narrative and conversational tone” that pulls readers in “like a close friend sharing a high stakes adventure.” Horn Book highlighted how Jackson “skillfully navigates the intersection of grief and discovery,” while Booklist noted that “Savannah’s past of enslavement and its Gullah ghost culture add interesting layers of history to the tale.”
Jackson has known she wanted to write since she was four years old. She never pursued an MFA. “There is no perfect path to becoming an author,” she told Salfen. “The way I learned how to write is by reading other authors and studying their craft… reading is the best advice I can give.”
Her own career-defining “Hail Mary” arrived during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Stuck in her New York apartment with flooded trains and no work, she finally had uninterrupted time. “I started writing, and I was like, oh, maybe I think I have a book idea. So I… went to the library, and that was probably my Hail Mary moment, where I took a week and just knocked out… the rawest draft I could probably think of. And that was probably the way I was able to actually make my career happen. If that hurricane didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have had that week.”
When the cursor blinks and the words refuse to come, Jackson doesn’t force it. “I typically tell myself I need to… sit down, I need to rest… go take a nap, go… read a book. Go watch a movie… and then come back to it with a fresher mind. Haste makes waste.”
What does she hope readers take away from Ghost in the Night? Three things: the travel bug for Savannah (“one of my favorite cities”), the understanding that “grief comes in many different colors, shapes, and sizes,” especially for children, and the encouragement to go on their own “fact-finding mission for whatever they’re interested in.”
Screen adaptations? Not yet. “I’m so wrapped up and still trying to launch this book… Hollywood can be very fickle, as we know.” But Jackson already has “a pipeline of ideas coming and going.”
In the meantime, Ghost in the Night delivers everything readers have come to expect from Tiffany D. Jackson: sharp pacing, fully realized young Black protagonists, emotional honesty about grief and family, and just enough supernatural chills to keep the lights on a little longer.
Get the book: Ghost in the Night is available now wherever books are sold, including Barnes & Noble and through the author’s official site at writeinbk.com/books.
Learn more about Tiffany D. Jackson and her growing catalog of thrillers and mysteries at writeinbk.com.
