Patti Frazee

Matty Patterson's biggest secret isn't that she's gay. It's that ghosts follow her everywhere. At school. In her bedroom. In the family living room. Even at the dinner table with her parents sitting right there. She's coping with it all until one ghost seems to beckon her.

She finally confides in her friend (and secret crush) Kat, who likes to keep to herself and listen to retro punk music on an old portable CD player. Kat can see spirits too, so she and Matty join forces with a local paranormal society. Now, instead of being hunted by ghosts, Matty hunts them. Or so she thinks.

When Matty works with the paranormal team at an abandoned convent, she is taunted by a creepy spirit who may or may not be her spirit guide, and the ghost who first beckoned her makes another ominous appearance.

Matty, Kat, and the ghosthunting team suddenly find themselves in the middle of a darkness that pulls them back again and again. Just when the team begins to wonder if the shadows are being unleashed because of their very presence, they realize they are deep in the magnetic field of a decades-long murder. 

No one paid much attention to Jude, the girl who lived in an abandoned building in the heart of Harmony, Nebraska. No one knew of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father or how she made her escape. No one, that is, except her best friend Alison. And when Jude suddenly disappeared Alison thought she had run away to pursue her musical dreams in New Orleans.

Twenty years later, as Alison’s life in Minneapolis begins to crumble and the tension in her longtime relationship begins to rise, Alison is faced with the news that Jude’s skeletal remains have been found. But Jude’s secrets didn’t die on the day of her suicide. When Alison returns to Harmony for the burial, she steps into the memories of the long-ago past and begins to fear that she may have caused Jude’s death.

Betrayal, lust, and guilt weave through this novel that transcends time, as Alison Bouchard struggles to find freedom from the life she has built and the lies she lives.


Patti Frazee’s great wisdom is in knowing that coming of age doesn’t stop with adolescence. In Out of Harmony, secrets from the past and present collide to force Frazee’s mid-life protagonist, Alison Bouchard, to take stock of her life. With humanizing detail, a judicious sprinkling of wit, and a sweeping sense of place from Minneapolis to a small Nebraska town to New Orleans, Frazee’s probing work is an ode to the power of the imagination and the ongoing quest for identity. Anyone who has struggled to rethink who you are and what you know will resonate. And cheer.
--Pamela Carter Joern, author of The Floor of the Sky and The Plain Sense of Things

A marvelous epic poem, a spectacular painting, a magnificent read for everyone who has ever dreamed about juggling fire, spinning in space, or falling in love with the girl on the flying trapeze. It's an elegant immigrant tale of the most migical kind!
--Judith Katz, author of The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound

Listen to Patti's Reading and Interview on Iowa Public Radio.
Live from Prairie Lights, September 6, 2006.