Book Name : The Family Upstairs
What is it about : At 25, Libby received a lawyer's letter, informing her of a family fortune, in the form of a 12 bedroom-mansion in fashionable Chelsea, London - valued at something like 6 million Pounds. Libby then decided it would be fun to team up with the investigative journalist who reported on that case of "cult mass suicide" and even the discovery of a wrapped up "mummy", in that very same mansion, all those year ago; Libby reunited with her remotely-related half family members later on and had a good old chin-wag about old times.
Some thoughts after having read the book : The technique used in this book would be the predictable 10-Pager set-pieces : the scene of Libby talking to her solicitors, 10 pages; the scene where Lucy plucked up the courage to borrow money from her wife-beating ex-husband, 10 pages; Lucy killed her ex-husband, 10 pages; the scene where Henry regaled his nightmare discovery that the hippies would be staying for years, 10 pages; the scene where Libby confided with Dido, her workmate, about the weird findings in old newspaper cuttings, 10 pages; Phin and Henry took an Acid trip, 10 pages and so on ... Promising to begin, with a seemingly sinister cult suicide-pact sensational start which went all the way downhill, ending with a jolly family re-union with those turning up splitting the spoils of a few cool million Pounds each, ha hum ...
Would I recommend this book to you : The book read like a collection of serialised pieces from glossy magazines, where one could easily have picked up the story development at any page. A book for the beach, as a companion to the post-lunch no-brains-required afternoon snooze. Or just read the last 20 pages, where like those annoyingly confusing whodunit movies, the detective would summarise in almost a monologue for all present (including the readers and audience) the in's and out's and whats-not's.
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