Chuck Schwerin’s novel begins in the Scottish Highlands and ends in the Adirondacks. In 1959, a young Hamish McLean climbs the mountains of his native Scotland. In 2002, McLean is the headmaster of a boarding school, Glencoe, in Lake Placid, searching the Adirondacks for three students lost on Mount Algonquin.

McLean’s Glencoe is an Adirondack residential school for grades five through nine. The school’s focus on experiential learning, including farm chores, is suggested by its Dewey Hall, presumably named after the famous educator and philosopher, John Dewey. Tracy Barcomb, Malcolm Dandridge, and Libby Goldman are among the approximately 70 students at Glencoe, struggling to get along with each other and perplexing their headmaster.

Not far from Lake Placid’s Glencoe is another residential establishment, Adirondack Correctional Facility in Ray Brook. Ramon Ortiz, from New York City, and Garth LaGrange, from Tupper Lake, are inmates at ACF. The distance depicted between a school and a prison, one filled with hope, the other filled with regret, is part of the charm of Schwerin’s novel.

Those two worlds, however, collide. On a winter hike, Tracy, Malcolm, and Libby get separated from their classmates and the two teachers/chaperones in charge. Alone and scared, they struggle to overcome adolescent insecurities, rivalries, confusion, snow and frigid temperatures.

Ramon and Garth, who had escaped from Adirondack Correctional Facility, are also in the woods. I will leave unspoiled what happens when the three students meet the two escapees.

A story set mostly at a residential school suggests a “coming of age” theme, and that is true of “Ghosts of Glencoe.” But it is the maturing of headmaster McLean, more than the students, that concludes the novel. McLean finally learns what he has been teaching — responsibility and accountability. He makes a phone call he should have made in 1959 after that hike in the Scottish mountains.

“Ghosts” is of the Adirondack neighborhood. There is a real-life model for Glencoe, and correctional facilities in Ray Brook. The descriptions of Adirondack peaks ring true. But the description of Hamish McLean’s eventual confrontation with his own failure, his own ghost, enhances the story.