Overall: 🐢🐢
Storyline: ★★★
Writing Style: ★★.5
Character Development: ★★
Enjoyment: ★
“But we all behaved badly in that house; not one of us got out of there without a black mark. I’ve come to accept our sins as survival strategies.”
The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell
The Story:
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.
Key Elements:
Thriller, Mystery, Murder, London, Family, Secret, Chicago, Crime, Domestic Violence, Cops, Multi-POVs,
More in The Series:
- Book 1: The Family Upstairs
Why This Rating?
There were ups and downs for this story. Clearly based on my ranking, I wasn’t a fan of it as a whole, but I’ll do my best at laying out the pros and cons and the issues I personally ran into with this one.
Starting off with the writing! I thought the author did a brilliant job at weaving mystery, thrills, and the twists throughout the story. The mystery behind the bones that the mudlarkers was incredibly laid out. It was also brilliant in the way we as readers discovered the facts and clues! I loved that we got to look into the detective’s mind while working through the case. However, there were SO MANY POVs happening. I needed my own Person of Interest board just to keep everyone straight. I usually like multi-pov stories because I am noisy and love to know what people are thinking on the other side, but this was too much. I think there were 7 POVs? I’m probably missing a few though. Made it very confusing to follow the story. Although, the writing itself was quite beautiful and had lovely descriptions, I think having so many POVs might have ruined the enjoyment for me. It certainly made me think while reading!
And unfortunately, one of my immediate negative marks is time jumping. Where I usually can agree that the time jumps are necessary and there are some authors that use it/do it in such a way they can climb out of my bad graces, this one did not. The time jumps were exclusively for tension in my opinion and didn’t bring much else to the table other than to annoy me. There weren’t really good markers explaining when we are or even who/where we are. We jump in and the readers get to piece together the answers. But do so quickly and write down what you think, because you won’t see or hear from this POV for a tons of pages! By the time that story line came back up, I barely remembered what the snap happened. Thank goodness for page tags. Go ahead and given everyone their own color and mark when they are main POV – you’ll need it! Just a fail on my part for the writing structure.
I think for those who like to race the characters in solving the crime, this would be a fun one to read. But go into knowing that you are about to start thinking overtime! The POV that will provide the most clues will be the detective, he is a blood hound and wants that truth so bad! I don’t know if it is possible to guess the whole answer before you get to the end, but I think it would be a fun challenge. I only got a few of the answers before the big reveal. And while you read, see if you can get the other mysteries figured out too!
I know that the book states you can read the books in this series independently. I’ll say that is 30% true. The book allows you to organically learn who the characters are as you interact and see through their POVs – which is probably what the author meant by you can read them alone. But I got so lost. There seemed to be nuances happening that I just never caught on to between characters. I later found out those were characters that we met in the first novel. Also, There was one character pairing I NEVER understood why the hell we had to include in the story and was confused every time we were in their bubble. Felt like it wasted pages bringing them into the limelight. Turns out, they were in the first one and this book just wrapped up the “what happened” for them.
TL;DR – Thriller mystery with a ton of POVs crowding for center stage that takes you not only all over the world but all over time with people you barely know and you won’t remember what you saw. And why the hell is Rachel still here.
Time to get lost in the next story!
