From the New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone 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.

Book Type:

Domestic Suspense

Review: The Family Upstairs

Lisa Jewell is back with THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS—a twisty domestic suspense about one family’s self-destruction.

We meet 25-year-old Libby Jones, who is shocked to inherit an abandoned mansion in Chelsea. She learns she was found as a 10-month-old baby, after her birth parents (the Lambs) died in a suicide pact. As she digs into her past, she uncovers the sinister truth about her family’s demise—how they went from the wealthy elite, to isolated, destitute and part of a rumored cult.

It all begins when a family moves in upstairs…

In an alternate timeline, we meet Lucy and her two kids. They’re homeless, and she’s desperate to find the means to leave France and return to London, to a past that continues to haunt her.

Through past and present narratives, we see how the Lambs were manipulated, how the children in the home were controlled, how everything began to unravel one thread at a time until in the end we had three dead bodies, four vanished teenagers, and one 10-month-old baby left in her crib.

Jewell really hooks you with a story so dark and unsettling, that you can’t help but keep reading. Suspense never really reaches an edge-of-your-seat level, however, but there are twists aplenty. And while the story felt rich, atmospheric and chilling, I admittedly craved more payoff at the end.

Nonetheless, this was a novel I devoured. Lisa Jewell weaves an intricately plotted story with characters you want to know more about, whose intentions you seek to uncover. It’s a great book for those who love a taut domestic suspense with a slow-burn type of unraveling.

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