When Mia and Finn buy a rundown fixer-upper in the Bedfordshire countryside, they think they are starting a hopeful new chapter — a first proper home, and maybe, after years of disappointment, a family. Then the renovations begin. A message scratched into a skirting board leads them up into the sealed attic, and to a discovery that turns their dream house into a crime scene and drags a decades-old horror into the present.
As the police begin to unpick what happened in the house long ago, John Marrs widens the story across several narrators: Mia and Finn in the present; Finn's watchful parents, Debbie and Dave, whose feelings about their new daughter-in-law run cold; and a pair of unsettling voices from the past and the margins whose testimony gradually explains the attic and the people who used it. The result is a portrait of a family, and a place, with something monstrous buried at its centre.
Dark even by Marrs's standards, Keep It in the Family is a twisty psychological thriller about inheritance, complicity, and the secrets houses keep. It is unflinching about its subject matter, building through overlapping timelines toward the full, disturbing truth of what was hidden behind the wall.