The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell (Random House UK, Cornerstone)

The Family Remains is a sequel to the bestseller The Family Upstairs. 

A bag of human bones is discovered on the foreshore of the river Thames. Inside the bag are clues that lead the police to murders in the past and to sister and brother and a person they are looking for in Chicago and who might answer some questions.

Their shared history is so big that it’s sometimes as if mere words cannot contain it and that it exists only in the pauses and the silences and the unfinished sentences.

Twenty-six years is long enough for memories to become abstract. People start to doubt their memories, to wonder if maybe things really did happen the way they think they happened. And in the house of horrors that Lucy, Henry, Clemency, and Phin were brought up in, the truth was constantly warped and distorted through the filters of their parents, the people who were supposed to care for them and protect them, and the people who instead allowed them to suffer abuse and depravity.

A dark and gripping, complex network of relationships, begins to unravel. For me was just a bit slow and at times too dark. But I think it just depends on the mood when I read the book.

3/5