Day 20 – 30 Day Reading Challenge – Family Remains – Book Review

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell comes an intricate and affecting novel 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—news that 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-ever 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 proves she is writing at the height of her powers with another jaw-dropping, intricate, and affecting novel about the lengths we will go to protect the ones we love and uncover the truth.

After reading The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell, I actually highly anticipated this book. And so I got my hands on its sequel The Family Remains afterwards and I have mixed reviews about the sequel.

The story starts with the discovery of bones by the Thames riverside. The bones were then found to be one belonging to Birdie (who we came across in Family Upstairs) and Detective Samuel Owensu is in charge of the case. Meanwhile Henry is obsessed to find the whereabouts of Phin that he actually goes to Chicago to look for him.

The pacing in the book was good. The story shifts first to Henry who is told in the first person narrative, Samuel who is told in the first person narrative and Lucy who is determined to stop Henry as she believed that Henry was going to kill Phin. Oh, then there’s a woman named Rachel who is married to Michael Rimmer who is actually Lucy’s ex husband. We all know that Lucy killed Michael in the first book and in this book, the French police are investigating the case and Rachel recounts her life with Michael.

The setting was great, the writing was great but I felt that the first book was a better than the sequel. I specifically liked reading Michael and Rachel parts. This book maybe read as a standalone but in my opinion, I think it is better to read Family Upstairs before reading Family Remains so you will have a keen idea about the characters and what happened.

Overall, to me this was an OK book–not Lisa Jewell’s best but an OK thriller. Worth three stars.