LITMIR.BIZ

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. Alongside some of the house's other curiosities and local sleuthing, Kay is led to believe that something terrible may have happened to the home's owners. Kay's investigation leads her to a local logger, Ben Comeau, a man beset with his own complicated and violent past. A product of the foster system and life-long resident of the Northeast Kingdom, Ben struggles to overcome his situation, and to help an abused child whose addict mother is too incapacitated to care about the boy's plight. The Underneath is an intelligent and considerate exploration of violence—both personal and social—and whether violence may ever be justified. "Finn does an excellent job of keeping the reader guessing, and the tension in the narrative always comes across as organic, never manipulative. The Underneath is an excellent thriller." —Michael Schaub, Star Tribune [/b]

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* New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2016. *  The Guardian 's «Not the Booker Prize» Shortlist. * Publishers Weekly's 'Big Indie Books of Fall 2016' [b]"Deeply satisfying. Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller. [ The Gloaming ] deserves major attention." —John Williams, New York Times </strong In rich, compelling prose, Melanie Finn perfectly captures a world of consequences, and the characters who must survive them. Pilgrim Jones' husband has just left her for another woman, stranding her in a small Swiss town where she is one day involved in a tragic car accident that leaves 3 school-children dead. Cleared of responsibility though overcome with guilt, she alights for Africa, where she befriends a series of locals each with their own tragic past, each isolated in their own private way in the remote Tanzanian outpost. Mysteriously, the remains of an albino African appear packaged in a box, spooking everyone—sign of a curse placed by a witch doctor—though its intended recipient is uncertain. Pilgrim volunteers to rid the town of the box and its contents, though wherever she goes, she can't shake the feeling that she's being followed. The Gloaming is a thrilling, haunting new work of guilt, atonement, and finally, hope. "A psychologically astute thriller that belongs on the shelf with the work of Patricia Highsmith. Alternating chapters between two continents, the book is brilliant on the pervasiveness of corruption and the murkiness of human motivation. Here is a page-turner that leaves its reader wiser." —Karen R. Long, Newsday

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