The New Couple in 5B by Lisa Unger
I would like to thank Harper Collins and Random Things Tours for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Harper Collins
Published – Out Now
Price – £9.99 paperback £5.99 ebook
A couple inherits an apartment with a spine-tingling past in this unputdownable thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six.
Rosie and Chad Lowan are barely making ends meet in New York City when they receive life-changing news: Chad's late uncle has left them his luxury apartment at the historic Windermere in glamorous Murray Hill. With its prewar elegance and impeccably uniformed doorman, the building is the epitome of old New York charm. One would almost never suspect the dark history lurking behind its perfectly maintained facade.
At first, the building and its eclectic tenants couldn't feel more welcoming. But as the Lowans settle into their new home, Rosie starts to suspect that there's more to the Windermere than meets the eye. Why is the doorman ever-present? Why are there cameras everywhere? And why have so many gruesome crimes occurred there throughout the years? When one of the neighbors turns up dead, Rosie must get to the truth about the Windermere before she, too, falls under its dangerous spell.
Moving home is both a great adventure and a huge worry. The chance for a fresh start, entering new stages in your life but then there are the bills, concerns over the neighbours and perhaps dreams become nightmares. In Lisa Unger’s new thriller, The New Couple In 5B we follow a young couple who get an amazing New York Apartment unexpectedly, but its history and current neighbours all start to unsettle our main character’s future and death appears to be following them.
True Crime author Rosie and her upcoming actor husband Chad have a shock when their beloved uncle passes away and unexpectedly leaves them his large and extremely valuable New York apartment in the prestige Windermere block. It offers financial security and could help the couple plan for their future as parents. But Rosie finds she is now being targeted by their Uncle’s estranged daughter who is not happy at losing her inheritance, the block is incredibly wealthy which makes for an odd fit, it has been fitted with a strange and somewhat overbearing security and intercom system all watched by an ever smiling doorman and then an unusual set of deaths arrive some of which start to put the charming Chad under the spotlight and pull Rosie into defending her husband when evidence suggest she should not. Is The Windermere about to add another dark chapter to its lucid history?
This is an enjoyable pacy thriller weaving present day and historic mysteries together with just a touch of the supernatural being hinted at. Rosie narrates the story, and Unger makes us feel her emotions – the highs and lows of a new wife that gets the immense benefit of potential wealth but then stress and even heartbreak. The new apartment isn’t perhaps enough when she is under work pressure, relationship concerns and then a lot of mysterious deaths. There is a fascinating echo with Rosie and Chad with a 1963 case where a couple mirroring them in many ways professionally lived in the same apartment. We get hints that too did not end well, and we follow both couples as things get worse and there is a strong sense of history repeating itself. Chad is shown to have secrets from his wife, the neighbours too appear to know too much more and the elderly Abi the doorman continues to smile and knows far too much about the residents. There is a strange oppressive atmosphere to the book that we can feel is wearing down Rosie’s mental resilience as everyone appears to know more than she does as to what is going on. Gradually this becomes clear and there is a lovely bit of misdirection awaiting us that makes us re-appraise the various characters as we go alone.
My niggles are slightly more than Rosie is quite a passive character across the book. She is more our witness narrating the story for longs sections that things just happen to, and then further things do. The investigative history author she is supposed to be doesn’t really come across very often. Her love for Chad also doesn’t quite work for me as the various suspicions grow instead make her knuckle down her defence of him and yet I never feel the best friend she is saying that he is. There is also quite a lot being packed into the plot from history, potential supernatural events, murders and suspicious deaths, Rosie’s own past and more that perhaps needed a bit more time to grow or combine with the bigger story or needed trimming.
I think you can have fun with the new Couple In 5B if you relax into it and it’s a very smooth read and just watch it unfurl. Curl up with a blanket and try not to think about the neighbours next door to you are up to too much!
