The Family Remains – Lisa Jewell
Genre: Mystery & Thriller
Published: 21 July 2022
Swathi’s Rating: 4.5/5
Blurb:
LONDON. June 2019: on the foreshore of the river Thames, a bag of bones is discovered. Human bones.
DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene and quickly sends the bag for forensic examination. The bones are those of a young woman, killed by a blow to the head many years ago.
Also inside the bag is a trail of clues which lead DCI Owusu back to a mansion in Chelsea where, nearly thirty years previously, three people lay dead in a kitchen, and a baby waited upstairs for someone to pick her up.
The clues point forward too to a brother and sister in Chicago searching for the only person who can make sense of their pasts.
Four deaths. An unsolved mystery. A family whose secrets can’t stay buried for ever ..
Thoughts:
How do you like a Dark, multi-layered, psychological thriller with several plot twists and timelines and unpredictable characters just waiting to be unleashed at the most unexpected moments and the effect the book has on you, stays for a very very long time after you’ve already completed reading it!!? Well, that’s one feeling I love the most in the reader’s world and I’m absolutely grateful that this fantastic, brilliant author always, ALWAYS delivers her very best.
The Family Remains is the sequel to Lisa Jewell’s addictive thriller The Family Upstairs that came out two years ago and I was way too excited to read more about the same characters that had been unforgettable at that time. But if you’ve not yet read the previous book, I’d say you’d still enjoy this one as this book has its own plots and several layers of elements in to keep you enthralled.
The book begins with the police finding the remains of Birdie who’d died in the final few chapters of previous book and thereby showing us the lives of Henry & Lucy Lamb. Henry who’d been an obsessive, clever and twisted fellow and Lucy, who’d do anything to bring up her children. There’s a fantastic, relentless detective who’s very keen on following the old bones of Birdie and he seems to be thrilled in every information he finds in the process. Meanwhile, there’s Rachel’s love story which ends tragically and there are different timelines, do not forget that.
If you think these are all sounding very complex and hard to understand, fear not. We have a brilliant author who’d done it all masterfully to avoid confusion and complication to the reader and have connected all her plots and subplots with such precision that you’d not get lost within the chapters. Yes it’s a chunky book, but enjoy the world that Jewell has created that I’m sure the author’s walls at home would have been full of photos and notes and whatnot and pins and threads connecting them all. I can imagine her mind working through it all, finding different ways to surprise her audience and I’m absolutely grateful for all her hard work and so glad I’d had the opportunity to read her books and enjoy them immensely.
Comes highly recommended from me.
About the Author:
LISA JEWELL was born in London in 1968.
Her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was the best- selling debut novel of 1999. Since then she has written another twenty novels, most recently a number of dark psychological thrillers, including The Girls, Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs and The Night She Disappeared.
Lisa is a New York Times and Sunday Times number one bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over twenty-five languages. She lives in north London with her husband, two teenage daughters and the best dog in the world.