The Lovely Bones is a novel which tells the story of Susie Salmon, a fourteen-year-old girl murdered in the early 1970s. After her death, Susie watches her loved ones cope with their loss from Heaven, witnessing the detectives try and fail to discover her murderer, her parents marriage fall apart, and her siblings and classmates grow up and move on. Though Susie will never be able to rejoin the living, watching over them enables her, and those she left behind, to eventually find peace.