She hears a silence at the other end of the line. She picks up her phone and calls her mother. But now that it’s here she’s not sure she can face opening it. She’s been subconsciously waiting for this envelope.

Libby is pretty sure she knows what’s in the envelope. She takes the letter into the kitchen and sits it on the table while she fills the kettle and puts a tea bag in a mug. The postal frank says: Smithkin Rudd & Royle Solicitors, Chelsea Manor Street, SW3. It looks very formal the envelope is cream in color, made of high-grade paper, and feels as though it might even be lined with tissue. Libby picks up the letter off the doormat. My sister and I had to learn how to survive.Īnd when I was sixteen, and my sister was fourteen, the baby came. They lived with us for more than five years and they turned everything very, very dark. I was nearly eleven when they came, and my sister was nine. It’s only now, with decades of hindsight, that I can see how odd it was. It was far from normal, but it felt normal because it was all I’d known. It would be inaccurate to say that my childhood was normal before they came. In The Family Upstairs, the master of “bone-chilling suspense” ( People) brings us the can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. 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. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. 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. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. “A haunting, atmospheric, stay-up-way-too-late read.” -Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling authorįrom the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone comes another page-turning look inside one family’s past as buried secrets threaten to come to light. “Rich, dark, and intricately twisted, this enthralling whodunit mixes family saga with domestic noir to brilliantly chilling effect.” -Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author A GOOD MORNING AMERICA COVER TO COVER BOOK CLUB PICK

The family upstairs pages