The Family Upstairs

by Lisa Jewell

Flipping between past and present, this weaving mystery/thriller follows the story of a beautiful mansion in Chelsea and what happened behind closed doors. On Libby Jones’ twenty fifth birthday, she receives an inheritance from her dead parents: a multi-million dollar mansion in Chelsea. Shocked at her reversal of fortunes, she excitedly takes possession only to discover a series of unsettling mysteries surrounding her birth parents and the people they kept in their home. Twenty-four years prior, her parents had been found poisoned along with an unidentified body while Libby’s ten-month-old self lay happily cooing in a crib.  

Who was the unidentified body? Who reported the dead bodies? Who was taking care of baby Libby while her parents lay dead? As these questions begin to be answered, more questions arise! Full of unreliable narrators, misdirection, and suspense, The Family Upstairs keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole way through. As the story weaves between past and present, and between character story lines, Jewell leaves just enough of a cliff hanger that you are desperate to get back to that thread thus making for a very fast read! 

I loved how this book started with what seemed like four or five completely unrelated stories, each interesting on their own, and managed to work them together tighter and tighter until they all connected. A well crafted mystery, in my eyes, ties up all the loose ends in a satisfying way, and I feel that happened in The Family Upstairs. 

If you like this style of mystery thriller, I would recommend The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks, or anything by Liane Moriarty.

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Caroline Kepnes

Joe Goldberg meets Guinevere Beck in a cozy bookstore in the East Village and it is love at first sight. For Joe.  Sadly, he forgets to ask for her number! Like any love sick person would do, he tracks her down using her credit card information, and finds the perfect opportunity on her Twitter feed to have a second ‘chance’ meeting to ask her out properly.  While a bit of an extreme reaction to most, this is a perfectly reasonable solution to Joe, a serial stalker.

Joe will stop at nothing to insert himself into Beck’s life, even if it means removing the people in her life who don’t spark joy. By adjusting Beck’s social circle and watching her communication through her stolen phone, Joe worms his way into her life without her realizing the true extent of his devotion.  Joe is not the staid, upstanding (if a bit boring), boyfriend she thinks him to be, but a deeply disturbed stalker, obsessed with every aspect of Beck. 

Told from Joe’s perspective, this novel is somewhat unsettling.  All his twisted rationale makes perfect sense when read from his viewpoint. While you know as the reader that everything he is thinking and doing are both criminal and deeply wrong, you can’t help but get swept up in the narrative he is creating for himself. Joe happens to be a weirdly likeable guy despite being a stalker and murderer with no conscience. 

Kepnes does an amazing job confusing who you are rooting for by letting you get to know Joe as the hero he thinks he is, despite showing you every horrible thing he is thinking. Joe’s narrative also has you truly hating those he sees as harmful to Beck.  You find yourself cheering him on as he brings them to their end even as you know what he is doing is wrong. 

As the bodies start piling up, and Joe becomes more and more single-minded in his obsession, will he escape detection? Will Beck escape his love unscathed? And what outcome are you rooting for?!  Well written, intense, and decidedly disturbing, this thriller is well worth a read!