Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

The Family Upstairs is the first book I’ve read by Lisa Jewell, although I’ve heard very good things about her others. I went into the book thinking it was going to be a thriller, but I’d put it more in the dark family drama / suspense category. The tale starts with Libby Jones who, upon her 25th birthday, receives a strange family inheritance. We then follow her as she unwinds her blizzard, and often dark, family history and find out what actually happened to her birth parents all those years ago.

The chapters move between the characters, and mostly flick between London and Nice, in the south of France. I loved hearing the story come alive through the different perspectives of each character. Sometimes you get more clarity on events, and at other times you are presented with even more questions. It all becomes clear eventually though.

I won’t spoil anything for you but the book definitely ended in a way that would allow for a sequel, so I asked the author whether or not there will be one. Her reply was “TBD ;)” so stay tuned?!

I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Bea holland, Dominic Thorburn, and Tamaryn Payne. They all did such a good job and I really couldn’t stop listening! You can get 3-for-1 audiobooks by using the code ‘LatestBookCrush’ on Libro.fm AND know that you’re helping independent bookstores at the same time (they give a portion of the proceeds back to a local bookstore that you nominate). Or you can grab the physical book here.

Synopsis:

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.

In The Family Upstairs, the master of “bone-chilling suspense” (People) brings us the can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.