I liked but didn't love this book. The premise is quite interesting: What if your dead relatives suddenly showed up on your doorstep, perfectly healthy and unchanged since the time of their death? What if it was your child or your teen-aged sweetheart? Would you welcome them back? Would you pick up where you left off? And what would happen next, if the dead just kept coming and coming? Is there a limit to what the world of the living can absorb? And if there is a limit, then what's the logical outcome? 
 The Returned asks all of these questions as it introduces us to a small Southern town and its inhabitants, whose reactions to the Returned range from open arms to outright hostility. Where the book succeeds best is in the small moments between people, as families are reunited or as a couple in their 70s suddenly get back their 8-year-old son, previously dead for fifty years. I was less interested in the action-oriented pieces of the book, in which the Returned end up detained and confined as the True Living become increasingly unhappy about their presence in the world. Once these aspects of the story took precedence, it felt to me that the narrative became much more familiar and lost a bit of the spark generated by the interpersonal dramas playing out in the families and households of the town. 
 My full review is up at Bookshelf Fantasies. I received a review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.