Rating - ⭐⭐
"The watcher sees who you are...and knows what you did.
It's the perfect home for the perfect family: pretty Nora Howell, her handsome husband, their two teenage daughters, and lovable dog. As California transplants making a fresh start in Brooklyn, they expected to live in a shoebox, but the brownstone has a huge kitchen, lots of light, and a backyard. The catch: its previous residents were victims of a grisly triple homicide that remains unsolved.
Soon, peculiar things begin happening. The pug is nosing around like a bloodhound. Nora unearths a long-hidden rusty box in the flowerbed. Oldest daughter Stacey, obsessed with the family murdered in their house, pokes into the bloody past and becomes convinced that a stranger is watching the house. Watching them.
She's right. But one of the Howells will recognize his face. Because one of them has a secret that will blindside the others with a truth that lies shockingly close to home--and to this one's terrifying history."
The Other Family is a standalone mystery thriller novel by Wendy Corsi Staub.
This book was, well, to put it bluntly, not very good. The story in and of itself was uninteresting and bland, and the execution of it was predictable. The mystery aspect was so painfully predictable due to very obvious hint dropping that took away any possibility of enjoyment on that front, and the thriller aspect was lacklustre.
As for the overall story in terms of the direction it went in, aside from it being boring, it ended up coming to a dead halt as it reached its conclusion. What I mean by that is the story literally just stopped once the big reveal happened. I felt like a huge chunk of the story was missing because of that, and it felt like the author just didn't know what they were doing with the story or how to end it.
I didn't care for a single one of the characters, not only because they were unreliable, but also just because nothing about them drew me in. There were also too many perspectives. If this had just stuck to Stacey alone as she unravelled the mystery tied to her family, then this may have made for a better story. Instead, we have to follow Nora and Jacob as well, who are the ones who made the story predictable.
All-in-all, I get why the rating for this book wasn't the greatest, because this was very much a sleeper book.
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