The Family Remains: the gripping Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller (The Family Upstairs, 2)

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Actually : this book is not a mystery or thriller. Of course there’s a crime investigation conducting by DI Samuel Owosu after a mud larking professional found bones of 25 years old ballerina thrown at Thames River. This is the sequel to Lisa Jewell's chilling The Family Upstairs, a top notch multilayered and intricate psychological thriller with its old and new characters. Jewell weaves her magic with her disturbed and unsettling storytelling, in which there are mysteries and surprising connections are made. In London, a mudlark discovers a washed up bag of bones on the banks of the River Thames. The bones are those of a young woman who had suffered blunt force trauma, DCI Samuel Owusu investigates as forensic evidence leads him to a Chelsea mansion in Cheyne Walk where 3 decades ago, three dead bodies were found in the kitchen. We become reacquainted with the Lamb family, Lucy, with her two children, Marco and Stella, her brother, Henry, and Libby, haunted by the trauma of their past. The novel is relayed through the perspectives of the various characters.

The clues point forward too to a brother and sister in Chicago searching for the only person who can make sense of their pasts. The story is told from the points of view of several different characters, and we, the readers, are assisted by the inclusion of a list of the major characters and their relationship to one another. Which is just as well as some of the characters have more than one identity. A year ago I listened to The Family Upstairs, the first book in the Family Upstairs series. The Family Remains is the second book (will there be more?) in the series and it's just as confusing, disturbing, and creepy as the first book. Of course it is, we still have some of the weird characters from the first book, going strong, and doing all their creepy things to other people. Expanding on #4... This was officially one star when Henry and Lucy reentered the UK with their fake passports AFTER Interpol had located them and they were questioned by the police. BRUH. You're telling me that Interpol wouldn't be waiting for you on the tarmac as soon as you landed to confiscate your fake documents and put you in jail? Instead Henry is like well they need us here so duh they still work! No... Just no. Once again, I'd let this slide in the 2 hot 2 handle cozy, but not in a book that's aiming for something more serious. This is just nonsense. You committed a serious crime and you're just in the streets because some small town Detective wants to keep an eye on you?? PLZ SIR!!!I definitely recommend giving this a read if you’ve read The Family Upstairs. You might get a better feel for the characters that way. Do you think Rachel and Lucy will continue to be friends, or do you think their bond in common is too painful for them to maintain a relationship?

Henry. Oh Henry. What was he supposed to be? A protagonist? An antagonist? An antagonistic hero? He was wilding to the max and then his lil redemption was connecting Finn with his daughter. Okay???? And what about his full-fledged stalking with the initial intent to make luv in da club to him (without consent most likely)? We just gonna blow right past that?? Lisa Jewell’s latest novel, “The Family Remains,” is a very confusing read in the sense that it involves a lot of characters, and the timeline constantly shifts from past to present. The narrative voice also changes with each chapter, with different characters voicing their perceptions and experiences and narrating the ongoing events in their lives. It begins with a prologue in which DI Owusu appears to be the main character, but as the narrative progresses, we realize there is no one protagonist but several. In the case of the antagonist, the situation becomes much more than complex. By the time you finish reading the novel, you still won’t be able to figure out whether there is any antagonist at all, if there is, whether there are one or several antagonists at the same time and whether he or she is a pure villain or mainly a person or people caught up in the course of fate and forced to do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise. 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). Do you think Libby would agree with this and resents her birth mother? Do you think Lucy is able to forgive herself by the end of the novel?This sequel started with a dead body, as these thrillers often do, and the opening of a twenty year old mystery. But what this leads into is more and more family drama, multiple twisting subplots that eventually, over the course of time, wind together and paint a bigger picture.