The first chapter of “The Lovely Bones” is a trap. Once you’re in it, there’s no escape.

It’s both horrifying and mesmerizing, the kind of writing that has you still reading while you’re leaving the bookstore.

Alice Sebold’s first novel is more than a suspenseful page-turner. It’s an innovative and tricky narrative risk that Sebold pulls off with aplomb.

“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered. …” the book begins.

Susie narrates from heaven, her heaven.

“When I first entered heaven I thought everyone saw what I saw. That in everyone’s heaven there were soccer goalposts in the distance and lumbering women throwing shot put and javelin. That all the buildings were like suburban northeast high schools built in the 1960s.”

The landscape of heaven that Sebold creates is entrancing in a lonely sort of way, a place where something has only to be desired and it will appear. Only life remains elusive. “Often I found myself desiring simple things and I would get them. Riches in furry packages. Dogs.

“Every day in my heaven tiny dogs and big dogs, dogs of every kind, ran through the park outside my room.”

And in the evening, Sebold creates for Susie a safe place of women and music and dancing dogs.

“Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer, the oldest resident of my heaven, would bring out her violin. Holly tread lightly on her horn. They would do a duet. One woman old and silent, one woman not past girl yet. Back and forth, a crazy schizoid solace they’d create.”

Susie watches as her family deals with her disappearance and the growing realization that something horrible has happened to her.

The description of how her sister deals with the death is particularly moving as she navigates adolescence and loss.

“I could see it happen: Lindsey’s body began to knot. She was working hard keeping everyone out, everyone, but she found Samuel Heckler cute. Her heart, like an ingredient in a recipe, was reduced, and regardless of my death she was thirteen, he was cute, and he had visited her on Christmas Day.”

Susie’s father is also thrown into turmoil, embarking on a mission to catch his daughter’s killer that threatens his own life.

Her mother’s way of dealing is probably the most disturbing and verges on implausible, but Sebold manages it effectively in the end.

And Susie’s brother, too young to really understand, grows up somewhat abandoned in a household that reels from loss for years.

Her friends, too, struggle with the incomprehensible and brutal killing, which continues to affect them.

Susie also watches her killer as he eludes police and she learns about his other victims. She gets into his brain, learning about his childhood and how he has unsuccessfully fought the urge to kill.

Sebold has license here, and she uses it, imaginatively unfolding an unpredictable plot.

Through the narration, Susie is portrayed as a likable girl just starting to become whom she would have been when she was killed. She was a thoughtful girl who wanted to become a nature photographer. Her home life was mostly happy and her relationship with her father was particularly moving.

She held bottles for him as he built tiny ships inside them. Susie, we learn, was a steadying force in the household. And the “lovely bones” are not Susie’s remains, but the connections that grew around her absence to mend a family.