Purgatory (Amy Harmon) Books in Order

The Purgatory books are small-town ghost stories wrapped in a tender young adult romance. Set in the fictional town of Honeyville, Texas, they move between the late 1950s and the present day, all orbiting a high school where time quite literally stands still.

In Slow Dance in Purgatory, a fight outside the newly built Honeyville High in 1958 ends in tragedy, and local golden boy Johnny Kinross simply vanishes. Decades later, orphaned seventeen-year-old Maggie O’Bannon takes a job cleaning that same school at night and discovers that the building—and its intercom—are haunted by Johnny’s unfinished life.

Maggie is practical, lonely, and determined not to lose anyone else. Johnny is the reckless 1950s bad boy frozen at the age he died. Their connection grows in empty hallways, over old songs crackling through the speakers, as Maggie pieces together what really happened the night he disappeared and Johnny starts to believe he might deserve more than limbo.

The tone is more bittersweet than scary. There are eerie moments—flickering lights, disembodied voices, the sense of being watched—but the focus stays on first love, grief, and the question of how long you can cling to someone who can’t walk out into the world with you.

Prom Night in Purgatory turns the story on its head. Through a twist that feels like a miracle, Johnny is pulled out of the halls he’s haunted and dropped into Maggie’s timeline. He gets the second chance he never expected, but finds himself a stranger in a new century, with another mystery to unravel before their happy ending is secure.

Together the duet explores time, choice, and what it means to let go without forgetting. Side characters, town legends, and flashes of humor keep things from getting too heavy, even as the books dig into loss and the long shadow of an old crime.

Read in order, the Purgatory series delivers one continuous arc about a girl who finally finds a home and the boy who has been waiting there for her for fifty years—proof that some loves are strong enough to cross both decades and dimensions.