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Lisa Jewell has written a spellbinding conclusion to her family drama that is surprisingly tense in places, leaving me holding my breath, heart pounding. The whole impetus for the sequel was to show him finding Phin who was very much in Botswana at the end of the first book.
All the sinister and creepy details about The Family Upstairs came flooding back to me with Lisa Jewell’s help as she referenced many of the details throughout the sequel.Henry was the most interesting, complex, dark and broken character of the book and I absolutely loved his POVs. Libby is also keen to track down her birth father – Phineas (Phin) Thomsen (son of cult leader David Thomsen) – who has been missing for over twenty-five years.
Rachel Rimmer has also received a shock—her husband, Michael, has been found dead in the cellar of his house in France. While I don't think it's necessary to go reread The Family Upstairs to refresh your memory, as the book does contain reminders, there's a lot of characterization and backstory that would be missing here if you jumped straight into this book without reading the first. I will own the little boy who I last saw looking at me in a mirror in a Chelsea townhouse all those years ago (393).Twenty-six years is long enough to doubt your recollection of things, to wonder if maybe things really did happen the way you think they happened” (69). You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The Family Remains” isn’t as unsettling as “The Family Upstairs”, and it lacks the same thriller pacing; yet I found it to be a satisfying read. Lisa is a New York Times and Sunday Times number one bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over thirty languages. I did not have time to read the first book again before I got to the sequel, so please keep that in mind when reading my review.
The most challenging aspect was trying to provide enough detail from the first book for a standalone reader to know what was going on, without clumsily info-dumping every few pages. 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. I wouldn’t have written the sequel if it had been merely a rehash of all the points of view from the first one. And as I told, the bones of a young woman found in Thames and another murder case in France may be linked to the Lamb siblings! We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Even though the author does a great job of recapping the events of Cheyne Walk, to really understand the characters, especially Henry, you need the full background. Lucy thinks to herself that she “hates herself for putting Libby in this position, for coming into Libby’s blameless, uncomplicated life and tainting it with subterfuge and darkness” (347).