The Madness Underneath

The Madness Underneath is a novel for young adults by the American writer Maureen Johnson, published in 2013 and the second book in her Shades of London series.

Rory Deveaux survived an attack by a copycat of Jack the Ripper, and the experience changed her: she can now destroy ghosts by touching them, which makes her useful to the secret unit that deals with the dead in London. She returns to her school from the convalescence her parents insisted on, hoping for something close to an ordinary term, and finds instead that her new ability has consequences for the people around her and that the police unit she has been helping is not telling her everything. Johnson writes the series as a mixture of a boarding school novel and a ghost story, and the books follow the same group of teenagers through a London where the recent dead have not gone anywhere.

The series began with The Name of the Star, and this volume continues directly from it and ends with a change that the next book has to deal with.