It’s surprising there aren’t more spooky thrillers that include mysteries, and more mysteries with spooks. When equal mixtures are applied — in other words, scary stuff happening for which a reason must be found — fans of both genres put the books on the top 10 list and a classic is born: The Exorcist, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, The Shining, even Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, her attempt to write a hot-selling Gothic novel, a genre that runs in and out of fashion but was very much in vogue at the time. Ms. Austen chickened out at the end, saving her Age of Reason credentials by proving the ghost of the ghastly old abbey was a silly fabrication, forgetting that ghosts, even if one doesn’t believe in them, are more fun to read about if they’re real, fictionally-speaking.

Edgartown and New York screenwriter and author Sarah Kernochan, in Jane Was Here (Grey Swan Press, $24.95), gives us the perfect mixture of spine-tingles and puzzles, plus she throws in an undertow of reincarnation philosophy — not only that it may exist, but that karma, i.e., the working out of transgressions from a past life into this present one, explains a whole lot of fine messes in which people find themselves.

How would you like it if you were a nice guy named Brett, who had in tow a 10-year-old son whom you’ve never had a chance to know, and who already was shaping up to be persistently sullen, and for your summer vacation at the shore, you instead swerve off a road in the boonies of Massachusetts because a sign pointing to a tiny town called Graynier unfathomably caught your eye? On a whim you rent a shabby Victorian house where you feel weirdly at home.

A few days later the wisp of a beautiful young woman shows up and declares ownership of this house; she feels it in her tiny bones and insists on moving in. Just when Brett is ready to send her packing, he sees her in her sleep and “Suddenly, unaccountably, he is drenched in tenderness . . . Every cell’s invaded: he loves her as he already has loved her, as if he started loving her long before he opened the door.”

Two other key characters occupy the drama, although neither of them would consider him or herself a glamorous star in the soap opera of their lives: Village thug and smart but unmotivated caretaker Hoyt Eddy is the town drunk, or certainly one of the more hell-bent alcoholics, and Marley Walczak is the town whore because she believes all the men who depend on her for easy sex are also fond of her.

Hoyt’s destiny and Marley’s literally collide when, coming in opposite directions late at night on a dark road outside Graynier, they spy a wisp of a young girl in a purple anorak and, steering to avoid her, smash into one another. Already losers, their lives are set to spiral into disaster.

Meanwhile the earnest and appealing young Jane, apparently known as Caroline in this life and warehoused as an autistic patient for most of her life in a psych ward, appeals to Brett to help her remember the full breadth of her previous life, the one whose details come to her in bits and pieces. He would do anything for her but, conversely, it’s difficult for him to believe this story. After all, you can love someone as “you’ve already loved her” yet it’s not unreasonable to ponder whether or not she is indeed mentally unstable.

The middle section of the novel changes unexpectedly to an epistolary romantic drama from the earliest part of Graynier’s history. The letters are written by a woman named Jane Pettigrew. Although the abrupt change in narrative takes some getting used to, it ends up pulling the reader into a deeper wonder and absorption into the waiflike, modern-day Jane’s quest. The mystery unravels, as does the fright component, but the final pieces don’t fall into place until long after we’ve returned to the present-day predicament.

As Ms. Kernochan lays it out – not that she holds any strict beliefs in her real life about how reincarnation and karma are enacted – one can be born into a new cloak of innocence, yet be riddled by the bad luck that comes of earlier evil deeds. “Why is this happening to me?” wails the woebegone Marley whose final indignity is a tumor whose removal deforms her face. Yet perhaps at some ethereal level, before she took human life this time around, she agreed to this particular series of events as penance.

We don’t know. We may never know. Or an occasion for complete understanding may arise as our souls float above our lost bodies.

We’ll just have to wait and see. What fun!

Ms. Kernochan has in real life experienced a ghost at her family’s ancestral manse in Edgartown. She has also inadvertently through hypnosis arrived at some unexpected touch-downs in past-life regression which helped explain a life-long horror of snakes (not that many of us adore snakes, but Ms. Kernochan’s fear went beyond the hum-drum; for a time in her life she could only visit Ireland and Hawaii where snakes are nonexistent – St. Patrick having driven out the slithery serpents from the former environment).

This exposure to the supernatural, and her script writing of various horror movies including What Lies Beneath, led her down these byways in the writing of Jane Was Here.

This is Ms. Kernochan’s second novel, the first entitled Dry Hustle. She has won two Academy Awards for her documentaries, Marjoe and Thoth. Among her screenplay credits are Nine and 1/2 Weeks, All I Wanna Do (which she directed) and, one of this reviewer’s favorite movies of all time, Impromptu, about the love affair between Chopin and George Sand, starring Hugh Grant and Judy Davis.

Jane Was Here is available at Edgartown Books, Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, and the Secret Garden.