The Family Remains – Lisa Jewell’s riveting and addictive sequel is a thrill a minute

The Family Remains is the much-anticipated sequel to Lisa Jewell’s 2019 bestseller The Family Upstairs, which told the story of a house of horrors that left three people dead, three teenagers scattered to different corners of the earth and a baby abandoned in her cot.

The Family Remains picks up the story 30 years on. It’s 2019 and when a mudlarker discovers a bag of human bones on the banks of the Thames it emerges that they are connected to the cold case of the Thomsen and Lamb families from the house of horrors all those years ago.

After fleeing London at the time, Lucy Lamb has recently returned, and she and her children are staying with her brother, Henry Lamb. But the burgeoning investigation stirs up old memories and fears and Henry disappears on a quest to find another figure from their past, Phin Thomsen.

The book is narrated by Henry, who is a kind of Ripley character, so obsessed with Phin that he has gone to great lengths to make himself look like him and sometimes even uses the name Phin. Meanwhile, Libby Jones, Phin’s daughter, has reunited with her birth mother Lucy Lamb (do keep up), and is planning to buy a house with money raised from the sale of the Chelsea mansion, the original house of horrors, which she inherited when she came of age.

The Lamb and Thomsen families already have enough skeletons in their closets, without adding a literal skeleton, and the police investigation tips them into a state of panic: one flees, one hunts, one lies, one hides, but all are on a collision course with each other and Jewell delights in letting the reader guess how it all might fit together.

This is Jewell’s 20th novel and her experience shows. The Family Remains is a masterclass in plotting, pacing and character. The story is airtight and compulsively readable (I read it in one sitting), and each chapter feels smooth and confident, interlocking perfectly with the next.

The characters give the story its emotional weight – you care about them almost immediately. Aside from the legacy characters, Jewell gives us beguiling new characters like DI Samuel Owusu, and Rachel, a young jewellery designer who is talented but struggling to make a success of her business. When she marries Michael after a whirlwind romance, her life changes and her path becomes tangled with the Lambs and Thomsens. Somehow, Jewell makes it all seem not only plausible but completely absorbing.

Jewell’s novel can be read and enjoyed as a straightforward, page-turning thriller, but there are also layers of social and political commentary built into the plot and the characters’ back stories, which give the novel depth and nuance. For example, in The Family Remains, Jewell manages to weave in stories of – take a deep breath – blended families, stalking, obsession, coercive control, domestic abuse, adoption, blackmail, revenge porn, suicide and more.

Jewell is a natural thriller writer – pacy, twisty, inventive and addictive – and it’s no surprise that she has sold ten million copies of her books to date.

I wondered how she would manage to bring all of the multi-stranded stories of The Family Remains to an effective close, but was pleased to find no loose end was left dangling and just when I thought the story was done, Jewell planted a playful explosion on the very last page, which left me with a wry smile and a deep sense of satisfaction. A very enjoyable thriller and excellent holiday read.

The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell, Century, €16.50