When I was in middle school I read a YA novel named Ghosts. All I remember about it was a kid, I think a girl, helped a pair of ghost siblings (older girl, small boy) solve the mystery of their deaths. And I think it turned out that their uncle killed them. Maybe. I remember the cover better than the story, unfortunately.
Do you have any idea how many books have the word “Ghosts” in the titles? Since you can’t copyright titles, and some authors (or their publishing companies) lack the common sense to pick a distinctive name, there are a lot of books like this that are hard to find if you don’t know the author.
Does anyone know a good way to search for these books? Even Amazon’s advanced search has no feature to give you only books with the exact title, so it spits back thousands of titles with the word ghost in them.
The only way for you to search better is if you have more details to narrow down your search.
Otherwise you can play around with the minus function. Since you know that the book you want isn’t Ghost World, search for “ghost -world” (without the quotes) to eliminate results with the word “world” in them.
Some library catalogs work pretty well for this, but not all do. Some catalog searches return books with the exact title first with titles only containing the word coming later. Some will let you refine the search by publication date, type of publication, words in the subject, etc.
If you search the New York Public Library catalog and do a “kid’s search” for “ghosts” in the title, the top result is The Ghosts by Antonia Barber (c1969). The description is
Oh, I do this with kids/YA books a lot, the thing I remember the most is the cover. If I can narrow it down to a few possibilities, I will check out the titles on www.librarything.com. Here is the page for the Antonia Barber book. Over in that column on the right, you can see covers of different editions. These are pictures that users submit, so you are at the mercy of chance that a user with the same edition you read sent in the cover.