Excerpt from The Family Upstairs

If you didn’t see my blog last week on fiction about anxiety, hop over and take a look at it now. There are some good books in there.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

This week I am reading The Family Upstairs, a domestic thriller by Lisa Jewell. There are plenty of twists and turns and misdirection. Several people return to the house they lived in as children, before their escape following the deaths of the adults in the home. All but one know what happened. One desperately needs to find out. So far it has kept me guessing at which clues are legitimate and which are red herrings.

“What was that message? On you phone?”
“What message?”
“I saw it. Just now. It said The baby is twenty-five. What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”

Lisa Jewell, The Family Upstairs

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.

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