If you haven’t read The Family Upstairs, start there first. In my opinion this is not a standalone, whatever the cover might suggest — without that backstory you’ll be lost.
For those who did read the first book, this picks up with siblings Henry and Lucy Lamb, now adults, still living in the shadow of a deeply traumatic childhood. Their parents fell under the spell of a controlling con man who essentially turned their family home into a cult — and the fallout from that is still very much haunting everyone. Lucy’s daughter Libby, who was left behind as a baby in that house, is about to travel to Botswana to finally meet her biological father Phin — a boy who grew up alongside Henry and Lucy during those dark years. But Phin mysteriously disappears before they can reach him, and Henry, who has always been obsessively fixated on Phin, takes off alone to track him down in Chicago. What follows is a multi-strand story — Lucy chasing after Henry, a detective investigating bones pulled from the Thames that lead back to that same Chelsea mansion, and a new character called Rachel, whose story of escaping an abusive husband slowly weaves into everything else.
It sounds gripping, and at times it is — but for me the multiple storylines and narrators made it feel a little scattered. It lacked the claustrophobic tension of the original. Rachel’s whole thread in particular felt like it dragged the pace down rather than adding to it.
Still worth reading if you loved the first book — just go in knowing it won’t quite hit the same heights.
Rating: 3.5/5
LCChaosandhome 
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