The Family Remains
A Novel
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4.1 • 803 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“Other authors are at a ten out of ten, for me, and Lisa is a solid hundred.” —Gillian McAllister, The Sunday Times (London) bestselling author of Wrong Place Wrong Time
The #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell weaves a “simply masterful” (Samantha Downing, internationally bestselling author) thriller about twisted marriages, fractured families, and deadly obsessions in this standalone sequel to The Family Upstairs.
Early one morning on the shore of the Thames, DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery. When Owusu sends the evidence for examination, he learns the bones are connected to a cold case that left three people dead on the kitchen floor in a Chelsea mansion thirty years ago.
Rachel Rimmer has also received a shock—her husband, Michael, has been found dead in the cellar of his house in France. All signs point to an intruder, and the French police need her to come urgently to answer questions about Michael and his past that she very much doesn’t want to answer.
After fleeing London thirty years ago in the wake of a horrific tragedy, Lucy Lamb is finally coming home. While she settles in with her children and is just about to purchase their first house, her brother takes off to find the boy from their shared past whose memory haunts their present.
As they all race to discover answers to these convoluted mysteries, they will come to find that they’re connected in ways they could have never imagined.
In this masterful standalone sequel to her haunting New York Times bestseller The Family Upstairs, “Lisa Jewell is a superb writer at the top of her game” (Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author) with another jaw-dropping, intricate, and affecting novel about the lengths we will go to protect the ones we love and uncover the truth.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
You’ll feel a lot better about your own family’s quirks after unpacking the dysfunction in Lisa Jewell’s engagingly offbeat thriller. The dark story of the epically messed-up Lamb family involves the discovery of some decades-old bones, an estranged husband murdered in his French home, and a pair of adult twins reckoning with the traumas of their past. Jewell cleverly tweaks her writing style to fit each beat, shifting from punchy and precise to dreamy and poetic depending on which character she’s dealing with. Though it reads as a standalone thriller, The Family Remains is a loose sequel to Jewell’s earlier hit The Family Upstairs. It’s a portrait of nastiness and dysfunction that’s too fascinating to look away from.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Jewell's lively sequel to 2019's The Family Upstairs juggles three different story lines that eventually overlap. In 2019, Det. Insp. Samuel Owusu investigates skeletal remains in a black trash bag that have washed up on the bank of the Thames. In 2016, 30-ish Rachel Gold, a London-based jewelry designer, meets Michael Rimmer, with whom she has a whirlwind romance that ends with Michael's murder in Antibes in 2018. The third plot strand focuses on creepy Henry Lamb; Henry's sister, Lucy Lamb, who was once married to Michael; and Lucy's daughter, Libby Jones, whose escape from their childhood "house of horrors" was the centerpiece of the previous book. Henry's obsessive search for Finn Thomsen, a companion from his terrifying and traumatic youth, worries Lucy, who tracks Henry to Chicago, while Libby is intent on finding her biological father. By rapidly jumping around in time, Jewell effectively keeps readers off balance all the way to the happy ending. Though this tale of child abuse and mayhem works as a standalone, those who haven't read The Family Upstairs will immediately want to rush out and do so.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful sequel
I was so happy to revisit with these characters that I grew to care about from the first book. I enjoy Lisa Jewell’s writing style. I feel it was a nice send off to all of the characters.
Way to much back and forth
I’m used to books that change narrators and times, but this novel carries it to the extreme, making it very difficult to follow the timeline. There was a huge cast of characters, and even though I’d read the first and 2nd novels in the series there’s been a lot of time and lots of other novels in between those readings and this book. It’s not enjoyable to spend so much time confused. None of the characters are good people or likable, even though they experienced trauma in the past. For these reasons I give this novel just 2 stars and I cannot recommend reading this book. It’s a swing and a miss in my opinion.
Almost perfect
Sequels almost always disappoint me. But this follow on to The Family Upstairs was almost perfect. I lived every page of it. EXCEPT the epilogue. It almost ruined the book for me. Almost. But not quite.