Review: The Family Upstairs

Hi, my name is Kaley and I'm a book blogger who has finally read her first Lisa Jewell book. I saw her books in the bookstores and online but never picked one up until the fine folks at Simon & Schuster Canada sent me an ARC of her latest, The Family Upstairs. I've been trying to read more thrillers, especially by women, so I thought, fellow bloggers are raving about her book (which published in the fall), I should probably hop to it. And hop I did. The story was addicting and I needed to find out what happened to the families that were intertwined in this novel.

Here's the synopsis:

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.

This novel was...interesting. I read it awhile ago but even after I finished it I wasn't sure what I thought of it. Like I said, I really needed to know how it ended. Jewell wrote a really twisted thriller and I had no idea what was going to happen. But...I'm not sure if I particularly liked it? I was left with a sort of "ick" feeling when reading the book because of how twisted it was...but I couldn't look away.

The story is told from three different characters. Libby, who's mentioned in the synopsis, Lucy, who you're not really sure who she is or why she's involved, and Henry, who was somehow connected to the mystery twenty-five years ago. That means there's a lot of information coming at the reader from a number of sources, and covering a couple of time periods, too. I think that helps make the mystery, well, more mysterious.

While I think the multiple perspectives helped the mystery overall, I'm not sure if it was as helpful from a character perspective. There were competing personalities that led to some characters, Libby in particular, to not be as interesting to read about. I think I sort of felt that, even though Libby was the reason the mystery was coming to light, she wasn't really necessary for the story.

Overall, The Family Upstairs wasn't a winner for me. Do I think this will turn me off Lisa Jewell's books forever? Not necessarily. I'll give her another shot because I think it was just the story in this one that I really wasn't a fan of rather than the way she created the story.

*An ARC of this novel was provided by the publisher, Simon & Schuster Canada, in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*