The Underhistory

Pera Sinclair was nine when her family home was destroyed and everyone inside died. She lived. Over the decades since, she has rebuilt Sinclair House, and each room now tells part of her story and part of the story of the people who died there.

She gives tours of the rebuilt house to visitors. Ghosts play no part in her beliefs, yet she is happy to tell a ghost story or two along the way, and she suspects the dead cannot tell the new house from the old one.

The novel takes place on the last tour of the season. Pera is leading one family through the rooms when a group of men arrives unannounced. They are dangerous, they mean to hurt the family, and they see no reason to leave an old woman alive.

They have misjudged her. Pera is far from helpless, and death has a habit of following her. This is gothic-tinged horror and suspense, narrated in Pera's own voice, with a menacing, eerie mood. A haunted house, a long-held grief and a woman who knows how to survive drive it.