Review: The Family Upstairs

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Family Upstairs is an unusual murder mystery/thriller. It's rather cerebral, and the events of the novel (three separate storylines) evolve with almost surgical care. The reader might spend more than half the book being lost as to the connections between the principal characters unless one pays a lot of attention to their ages.

We meet Libby Jones, who has just turned twenty-five years old, on the day she learns that she is inheriting Cheney Walk, a swanky, abandoned mansion in London's Chelsea district. Interestingly, twenty-five years before, mysterious goings-on took place in the mansion, in what looked like (ironically) a small-scale Jonestown murder-suicide pact, where a trio of adults were found poisoned. A baby, Serenity Lamb, who is our present-day Libby, was found in perfect health in this house with dead adults. But several older children are missing from the scene investigated by the police. As Libby begins to learn more about the house, she is shocked to find evidence that someone is still living in it. Her friend Dido assures her she has to be wrong, but when sure enough, when they go back with a companion, Miller Roe, they find evidence that someone is entering the house through a secret door upstairs and spending time in the house. And then there are the odd stories of Lucy, and her two children, who are trying to get back to London, and Henry, who is musing about the events of the past. These three stories are woven together until we see a stark portrait of how a cult can be built from the ground up by a man like David Thomsen, how minds are turned and twisted until parents don't even safeguard their children in the simplest of ways. Libby, Lucy, and Henry are all survivers with an interesting, if occasionally truly horrifying, story to tell.

This was an engaging read, and the audiobook, narrated by Tamaryn Payne, Bea Holland, and Dominic Thorburn, was smashing. The different voicing of the characters of Libby, Lucy, and Henry all added a dimension to the book for me.

CW: misogyny, murder, child physical abuse, child sexual abuse.

I received an audio review copy from Simon and Schuster and Libro.fm in exchange for an honest review.

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