Beneath the Rock

What would you do if the person you trusted most was the one you should fear?

Mary Hamilton grew up believing her mother worked herself to the bone for her — two jobs, sleepless nights, tired eyes. She told herself that was love. But looking back, the cracks were always there. The late-night phone call her mother didn't want her to hear. The emergency money tin, wiped clean without explanation. The morning her mother dressed up in perfume and curled hair and left for work without her uniform. Small things. Strange things. The kind of things a fourteen-year-old tells herself mean nothing.

Then her mother disappears for seven days, comes back glowing and younger-looking, and pulls Mary into a hug that feels more like a secret than a welcome. And everything that follows, every lie, every locked door, every shadow that seems to breathe, begins with those cracks.
When Mary is brought to a vast, decaying mansion on the edge of nowhere, she senses immediately that something is deeply wrong. The house has a weight to it, a silence that presses down like a held breath. There are rooms she isn't meant to enter, questions she isn't meant to ask, and a little girl named Lacey whose name makes the staff go still and pale. Lacey, they say, simply ran away. Couldn't bear the grief after losing her mother. Slipped off into the world and never came back.
But Mary has learned what it looks like when adults are hiding something. She has learned to read the cracks.

As she digs deeper into the mansion's past, what she uncovers is more chilling than she ever imagined. A mother poisoned slowly in her own bed, a father who traded his daughter's life for a fresh start, and a killer who slept soundly through it all. And the closer Mary gets to the truth, the more she realizes that the danger isn't buried in the past. It's still here. Still watching. And she may not be as safe as she thinks.
Beneath the Rock is a gripping gothic debut from Chasity Phillips, a story about the betrayal of those who should love us most, the silence that allows evil to thrive, and one young woman's refusal to let the dead be forgotten. Dark, atmospheric, and impossible to put down, it asks the question we all hope we'll never have to answer:

How well do you really know the people closest to you?