
On December 6, 1973, in Pennsylvania, Susie Salmon takes her usual shortcut home from her school through a cornfield. George Harvey, a 36-year-old man who lives alone and builds dollhouses for a living, persuades her to have a look at an underground den he has recently dug in the field. Once she has entered it, he rapes her, then kills her, dismembering her body, whose parts he puts