Dangerous Wishes by William Warner Sleator III

Dangerous Wishes is an intense, exotic, and wonderful story of adventure. It takes place in Thailand, a country Sleator knows well, and readers unfamiliar with Thailand will be absorbed by how the customs of the Thais are seamlessly woven into the narrative. In addition, the novel is one of Sleator's best tales of adventure and the supernatural, with his fifteen-year-old protagonist Dominic caught up in a race to save family and friends from a terrible curse. The novel's concluding movement, a chase in which a spirit pursues Dom and his friend Lek, is as riveting as any in literature, with Thai spiritual beliefs brilliantly rendered to create a situation of breathless terror.