For those of us that like a really unsettling book
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The blurb
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.
The Review
Now we are in full COVID-19 lockdown, I've been using my one authorised bit of outside exercise a day, to go for a walk in the woods. And there is nothing better to while away a walk, than an absolute stonker of an audio book. And this one is a really good one - there are 3 narrators who tell the unfolding story from different viewpoints. All 3 voice actors are brilliant and distinct, which helped to keep the majority of the other characters clear in my head, something those that have read this in normal format, said was a challenge to start with.
Through the 3 different narrators, this story is slowly unveiled. You learn different aspects from each one and slowly all the puzzle pieces start to fall into place. I do love a mystery where at first nothing seems to fit and then you have loads of, "oh, I seeeeeee" moments. You don't know how the three stories are going to converge, but as they do, it starts to get really chilling.
This is one of those books where you cannot really talk about the plot without giving up some pretty big spoilers, so this review is going to be short and sweet. Suffice to say that The Family Upstairs is engrossing, fascinating and compelling. There are parts of it that can make for pretty uncomfortable reading, but for those of us that like a really unsettling book, I think you'll find this is one you can't put down.
My favourite quote from The Family Upstairs:
"They weren't bad books...they were just books that you didn't enjoy. It's not the same thing at all."