When author Travis Glasgow and his wife move back to Maryland, the tragic history of their new house brings back Travis's own childhood and the death of his younger brother. Floating Staircase is the story of both tragedies and how they're connected.

Set in a small town (an environment Malfi really nails), Travis slowly becomes obsessed with his new house's former owners and the mysterious death of a young child the prior summer. Travis not only sees this death through the lens of his childhood, but also through the lens of a writer, and this quickly puts his marriage, and possibly his own life in danger. 

Something important to note is that the descriptions on the back paint this as having WAY more to do with the haunted house trope than what the story actually is. This is much more of a dark mystery drama than anything else. The supernatural elements are barely there (I'm not complaining about that btw), and it's very much tied up with questions of how reliable Travis is as a narrator. 

I think with this book, I'm seeing the first signs of what comes to mind when I think about Ronald Malfi: main characters dealing with a tragic past that turned them into flawed and damaged adults, very thoughtful character development, and a knack for dark, moody atmospherics.

I've read Snow (the only other easily available book older than Floating Staircase in print), so I don't know if that was a one-off, or more indictive of Malfi's earlier writing. Snow was fun, but very different from everything else since then, which is much stronger.  Having read and loved The Narrows and December Park, which were published very close to Floating Staircase, it's clear that Malfi really tapped into something special in the early 2010s.