Title: The Family UpstairsAuthor: Lisa Jewell
Series: The Family Upstairs #1
Published by: Atria Books on Nov. 5, 2019
Genres: Mystery/Thriller
Pages: 352
Format: ARC, Paperback
Source: Simon & Schuster Canada
Book Rating: 9/10
From the New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone and Watching You comes another page-turning look inside one family’s past as buried secrets threaten to come to light.
Be careful who you let in.
Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.
She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them.
Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.
Review:
Creepy, dark, and unsettling!
The Family Upstairs is a well-crafted, gritty novel that takes you into the lives of the Lamb family, specifically Lucy, a mother of two scrounging to make ends meet, Harry, a middle-aged man with a chilling, childhood story to tell, and Libby Jones, a young woman who suddenly finds herself the inheritor of a Chelsea mansion with a wicked past.
The writing is intense and intricate. The characters are troubled, vulnerable, and deceptive. And the plot told from multiple perspectives and alternating between timelines quickly unfolds into a complex story full of mind games, manipulation, obsession, jealousy, abuse, unforeseen twists, well-timed surprises, violence, and pure evil.
Overall, The Family Upstairs is a disturbing, gripping, eerie tale by Jewell that once again highlights that when it comes to writing menacing, intelligent, tortuous, psychological thrillers she’s one of the best.
This novel is available now.
Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
About Lisa Jewell
Lisa Jewell is the internationally bestselling author of sixteen novels, including the New York Times bestseller Then She Was Gone, as well as I Found You, The Girls in the Garden, and The House We Grew Up In. In total, her novels have sold more than two million copies across the English-speaking world and her work has also been translated into sixteen languages so far. Lisa lives in London with her husband and their two daughters.
Photograph by Andrew Whitton.
