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With the assurance and grace of her acclaimed novel The Gloaming -- which earned her comparisons to Patricia Highsmith -- Melanie Finn returns with a precisely layered and tense new literary thriller.The Underneath follows Kay Ward, a former journalist struggling with the constraints of motherhood. Along with her husband and two children, she rents a quaint Vermont farmhouse for the summer. The idea is to disconnect from their work-based lifestyle -- that had her doggedly pursuing a genocidal leader of child soldiers known as General Christmas, even through Kay's pregnancy and the birth of their second child -- in an effort to repair their shaky marriage.It isn't long before Kay's husband is called away and she discovers a mysterious crawlspace in the rental with unsettling writing etched into the wall.