The Family Upstairs

In The Family Upstairs, Libby has always known she was adopted, but on her twenty-fifth birthday, she discovers she’s inherited a house. Not just a regular house, but the massive Chelsea mansion that belonged to her birth parents, and where her parents were found dead in an apparent cult suicide. Although her parents and an unknown third person were underfed and wearing handmade clothes when they died, baby Libby was found healthy and safe in her crib upstairs. There are also reports of other children who’d been living in the house and were never found. Naturally, she starts to investigate her birth family, and also naturally, she uncovers so many twisted family secrets.

The pacing is just slightly off in The Family Upstairs, mostly when a character alludes to their Big Secret and then tries awkwardly to drop the subject. (This is my least favorite way to build suspense.) But there are so many twists and skillful misdirections that I loved it anyway. There’s a real question of complicity throughout this story, as we see characters pushed to take more and more disturbing actions, often because there aren’t any good choices or because everything is already so far off the rails that these disturbing choices kind of make sense.   There’s a character who’s completely evil,  and then there’s kind of an orbit of people either actively helping him or passively enabling him, or they could be aware of his evil, if they looked closer. I think that’s much more frightening than direct evil, personally, because it feels more possible.

I just loved the twists, with disturbing surprises right up until the very last page.