After years of dating and not finding the one, she meets a man called Michael who seems almost perfect for her. Rachel is a jeweller, just waiting for a big store to pick up her designs and thrust her work into the limelight. As well as Samuel, Henry and Lucy narrating the story, we have a woman called Rachel narrating a present day storyline too. However, she doesn’t take the easy option, she chooses to introduce new characters and storylines that are equally compelling and link into to the Cheyenne Walk mystery. She could have plodded along, unravelling secrets from long ago and it would still have been a very good book.

Lisa Jewell really is the master of this domestic noir genre. This is just the first step in untangling a very dark web of trauma, murder and a family who have tried to bury secrets that just won’t stay dead. Why was the Thames body separate from the other three and what was her link to the adults living there? The house has just sold for over seven million pounds and it’s owner is a young woman called Libby, so she must be their first port of call.

They’re looking for a third teenager, Phinneas Thomsen, son of the third deceased adult and also a resident of the Chelsea mansion, hoping he can make sense of their childhood. We follow DCI Owusu’s investigation, but also this missing brother and sister who are doing some investigating of their own. Yet, neighbours had said they hadn’t seen the children for years. The clues are pointing to two missing teenagers, Henry and Lucy Lamb, belonging to two of the deceased. There, thirty years ago, three people were found dead in a kitchen and upstairs was an unharmed baby girl with a rabbit’s foot tucked into her cot. The other clue from the bag is a mulch of leaves, unusual ones for London, taking him to a mansion house in Chelsea. When he sends the bones for forensic examination it’s clear that she was murdered there’s an injury to the skull that could only have come from blunt force trauma. Detective Samuel Owusu thinks the same, when human remains are found washed up on the banks of the Thames by a mud lark.

The book was certainly satisfying as a standalone, but the characters were so complex and their situation so traumatic I was certain it would bubble up to the surface sooner or later. Ever since reading Lisa Jewell’s novel The Family Upstairs I’ve been hoping she’d write a sequel.

The family remains paperback