In this week’s episode, Brook and Sarah discuss the choices they would make if they were the characters in Lisa Unger’s 2024 release The New Couple in 5B. Note: The conversation goes into detail about the book and contains spoilers about its plot, so if you haven’t read the book, you might want to do that first.
Discussed and mentioned
The New Couple in 5B (2024) Lisa Unger
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Transcript
This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.
| Sarah | Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah. |
| Sarah | Hi Brook. |
| Brook | Hi, Sarah. Well, it’s time for one of our favorite type of episodes. |
| Sarah | Yes, we’re doing another What Would You Do episode where we discuss the plot of a book talking about what we would do if we were in the shoes of the main character. We do dive pretty deep into the plot. So, if you haven’t yet read the book, we suggest that you do that if you don’t want any spoilers. And this time we are doing Lisa Unger’s The New Couple in 5B. |
| Sarah | We meet true crime author Rosie Lowan in a precarious period in her life. Writing her second book isn’t going well. Her actor husband Chad hasn’t had a breakthrough role yet, and they’re running out of money. Despite this, the couple is happy and in love, even trying to start a family. |
| Sarah | Things start to turn around when Chad’s uncle Ivan leaves Chad and Rosie his multi-million-dollar apartment in his will. Ivan’s estranged daughter, Dana, is understandably upset and in a burst of anger says to Rosie that Rosie doesn’t know her husband as well as she thinks she does. |
| Sarah | Chad brushes the comment aside, and the couple prepares to move into the Windermere, the pre-war building where they had nurse Ivan through a terminal illness. The building is also the subject of Rosie’s new book, and she views moving into the apartment as an opportunity to dive even deeper into her research, the dark history of the building and its residents, and to turn her book proposal around. |
| Sarah | The neighbors are welcoming, and though Rosie had met and liked Charles and Ella, their immediate neighbors, when she and Chad were caring for Ivan, something feels a little off with them. Through her research, Rosie discovers that their apartments were originally a single unit, and Charles’ family were among the first to live in the building. |
| Sarah | In fact, most of the residents have lived in the Windermere for decades, but Rosie struggles to find anyone willing to talk about its history. Rosie finds a box and a letter that Ivan had left for Dana and arranges to give it to her, hoping that it might begin to patch things with the last of Chad’s living relatives. He had no siblings, and his parents died in a car accident when he was a teenager. On her way to Dana’s, the box is misplaced. Rosie arrives at Dana’s studio with her friend Max, who is an editor at the publishing house that has just purchased Rosie’s book for a healthy advance, and the pair find Dana dead. |
| Sarah | The box turns up in Rosie’s apartment without the letter, and not for the first time, Rosie questions whether she can trust her memory. It seems that Rosie’s neighbors know everything about her life, and this is making her uncomfortable, especially as she continues to wonder about Dana’s box and her death. |
| Sarah | The building has recently installed a system that alerts the doorman, Abi, when anyone calls his name. The building’s older residents say this feature is a comfort, but it adds to Rosie’s growing unease around the doorman who seems to never leave. |
| Sarah | She’s also unsettled by her periodic sighting of a ghostly child in the halls. As readers, we discover before Rosie does that Charles and Ella’s young son died in a tragic fall down the elevator shaft. The couple who owned Ivan’s unit before him also had a tragic past, and the wife, Willa, had been having an affair with Abi, who has been the Windermere’s doorman for at least six decades. |
| Sarah | Rosie becomes pregnant but loses the baby the same night that another resident, Xavier, whom Rosie had arranged to meet with to hear his theories about the building, appears to jump to his death. Rosie’s sister shows up because she is worried for Rosie. Their family comes from a line of seers and psychics, though Rosie has distanced herself from them, believing her father to be more adept at fraud than fortune telling. |
| Sarah | Rosie begins to worry when she can’t reach her husband, who is supposed to be on set of the TV series he has recently been cast the lead in. The police are also looking for him after Ivan’s former nurse is found dead. |
| Sarah | Rosie visits Charles and Ella, and it turns out that they have been poisoning her and Chad in the hopes of securing their apartment so they can restore their units into one. They are responsible for Xavier’s death and kidnapping Chad. A few months later, Rosie realizes that Chad was behind Dana’s death and when Chad was younger, the deaths of his girlfriend and his parents. The book closes with Rosie visiting her family home to welcome her sister’s baby. |
| Brook | Thanks, Sarah. That was an excellent, excellent summary of what is a really involved book. There’s a lot going on in this story. |
| Sarah | There is definitely a lot going on and it kind of um gets a bit wild at the end, I think. |
| Brook | Yes, yes, I agree. But let’s start our what would you do questions back at the beginning. So, they find out that they’re going to be the recipients of this amazing apartment building. And when she goes to let their current landlords know that she’ll be canceling their lease, what would you do when you find out that your husband already canceled the lease like two weeks before? |
| Sarah | Yeah, and and this is when he has said he didn’t know that Ivan was planning to give them the apartment. And, you know, Rosie makes a point of saying that Chad is not a particularly administrative person. And so, for him to take on something like canceling the lease is very out of character. So, I think for me, I would be, you know, what is going on? Maybe he wasn’t truthful about the situation and and that’s how he explains it to her. He says, “yeah, you know, Ivan had mentioned that he was planning to give me the apartment and I just was so excited that I cancelled the lease.” |
| Brook | Right. Yeah, it would definitely, you know, perk my ears up. Like, hmm, this is an interesting situation. |
| Sarah | Yeah. But you know she loves Chad and is willing to set that aside. |
| Brook | Yep. |
| Sarah | So what would you do, Brook when you are certain that you had brought this box down to the front, seen the doorman load it into the taxi. And then when you arrive at the destination, you find that the box is not there? |
| Brook | Yeah, this is probably the biggest turning point what would you do that we really get to in this story. I think that I would make a bigger deal out of it because she goes back and the doorman basically just starts gaslighting her like “you didn’t have a box with you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And it becomes this he said, she said situation. But I just feel like I would have like maybe solicited some help from my husband in confronting him or my friend because at that point, you know, she’s getting along quite well with Ella, the next-door neighbor. “Like, come on, somebody help me here because he’s basically telling me I’m crazy. And I know that I’m not.” |
| Sarah | Well, and, you know, Xavier is in the elevator with her when she’s got this box and she asks Abi to put her in touch with Xavier. Why she doesn’t go and knock on his door. I don’t know, ah because I think that’s probably one of the things that I would have done is, you know, figured out which apartment is he in? And maybe Abi’s not going to tell you, but surely one of the other residents is going to do that. And just say, hey, do you remember me having this box in the elevator? |
| Brook | Mm hmm. Yeah, good point. |
| Brook | Right? Because at this point, even if nothing else was going to come of it, I want to make my point with this guy. Like “You, whether it was by an accident or whatever, you didn’t load the dang thing, but I had it with me.” |
| Sarah | yeah Yeah. And then it’s found in their apartment, right? And Chad is like, “well, you mustn’t have, you mustn’t have brought it downstairs. You’ve got a lot of things on your mind. it You meant to, but you didn’t do it.” But the letter isn’t there. |
| Brook | Right and the letter is never found. |
| Sarah | Right, and at the end, Chad kind of admits that that letter contained an apology from Ivan for having abandoned Dana. And in it, he says, “I hope this makes up for it.” And it becomes clear that had Dana received that letter, it would have been clear that Ivan’s intention was for her to receive the apartment as she had originally claimed, right? But because, um as we find out, Chad had Ivan sign the apartment over to him and Rosie, in his dying days, when he probably didn’t have the cognitive function to actually know what he was signing. And Chad didn’t want that found out. |
| Brook | Right. But it actually would have been too late even if she had that letter and had that box because when she shows up to Dana’s house and, um, you know, here’s another one. What would you do when you get there and this woman who just called you and said, “let’s get together. I have important information for you,” you know, is dead. And it sort of appears like a suicide. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I would be really unsettled. And, you know, I didn’t mention this in the introduction, but this isn’t the first kind of tragic event that Rosie has witnessed in recent days. The book opens with her and Max having lunch and witnessing a terrible accident between a cyclist and a car or truck. I think it would it would really rattle me. |
| Brook | Right. And I think those questions, again, we’ve got Chad canceling the lease, Dana suddenly dying. I think those questions would really be, you know, at top of mind for me. I don’t think we see Rosie really processing that way at this point in the story. She’s still willing to trust Chad. |
| Sarah | Yeah, because I think he was supposed to have been at a rehearsal, and she might have even gotten a call from someone saying, “hey, where’s Chad?” And he has an excuse for her for you know why he wasn’t where he was supposed to have been. And you know much later at the end of the book, we learn that he was killing his cousin at the at the time, but um kind of in the in the initial wrap up, Dana’s death is blamed on Charles and Ella as part of their plan to um secure that apartment, right? Chad has, you know, he, he’s got an excuse for every question that Rosie has for him. |
| Brook | Yeah, I did enjoy Lisa Unger’s use of having an actor in this um character’s role because it made me imagine what that would be like being married to an actor. You know, this person who is potentially capable of portraying anything they want to you, that they’re very good at, you know, they can cry, they can be angry, they can, you know, just, you know, manipulate the situation because of this talent and skill that they have. That would be really unnerving. |
| Sarah | I think that’s a great point, Brook, and an actor is a really great um character to have as an unreliable narrator, right? And and in this book, Chad isn’t the narrator, but he’s definitely an unreliable character. |
| Sarah | um So just thinking about that Rosie’s background where her family, you know, are fortune tellers and psychics and tarot card readers. um And there is kind of a thread of ah this evil eye necklace that several of the characters have. If you were Rosie, do you think you would pick up on that a little sooner than she did. |
| Brook | Yeah, I see what you mean because she comes from this history that she’s trying to you know distance herself from. She’s trying to to convince herself that she doesn’t believe in any of that. But the first time she sees it, um it’s Chad is wearing one. And he explains that Ella gave it to him. She gives it to everyone. It’s kind of you know a party favor, just a gag. But considering the background of Rosie, I think that would you know cause a red flag for her, because why that symbol, right? Like it could have been anything. It could have been a four-leaf clover. It could have been anything to have, but that would kind of creep me out considering what I would know about that symbol. |
| Sarah | Yeah, and she first notices Chad wearing that necklace the day that Dana dies, right? And then Dana also has a version of this necklace when Rosie finds her. I wonder if I wouldn’t have drawn some conclusions a little earlier, but you know we we hear from Rosie about how much she loves her husband and clearly she’s just willing to set aside any of those questions. |
| Brook | I will say the detail of the necklace never really made a lot of sense to me because I was confused I assumed as it was being you know dropped throughout the story that they were in some sort of alliance together you know anyone with the necklace is part of the quote unquote bad guys. But that didn’t come to pass and I wasn’t sure why these people would continue to wear the necklace that Ella gave them um but you know I guess that’s neither here nor there. |
| Sarah | I do agree with you, though, Brook. I wonder if there wasn’t some intention behind it originally that got removed and in in the editing of the books because she Rosie does observe several people with this necklace, and you would think that there was some meaning behind it. |
| Brook | Mmhmm. |
| Sarah | But we do learn that Charles’s family is also a family of fortune tellers or mystics. And um there’s other people in the building who kind of have that affinity, right? They have this, um is it a fortune telling night? That seems to happen regularly as well. |
| Brook | Yes. |
| Sarah | So there’s definitely a spiritual element to many of the characters in the book. And there’s you know some um another character that that Rosie visits to see as part of her research. And he talks about buildings having memories and that if the spirit of the building is not good, people will avoid living in that building, right? The implication being that the spirit of the Windermere is tainted as are its residents. |
| Brook | Which ties in really nicely to these sightings of this little ghost boy that she sees. She sees him for the first time, like the very day that she is there as a resident. And you know that was one of my questions for you. Given her past and now her accidental living there, what would you do if you’re in the basement and you see the ghost of a little boy and he’s like clearly been harmed, right? He has like lacerations on his face or something. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I think I would be pretty creeped out. Especially given her background, right, where I mean, she’s distanced herself from it. But I think she does believe in some people, maybe not her father having any of those skills, but I think she does believe, and even in herself, she kind of talks about that she had a bit of an affinity for um being able to predict what was going to happen. I think there’s a scene where she talks about um being in the kitchen when she was quite young and and talking about fire and then and then there was a fire later later that day, right? I think she has ignored that and not cultivated that in herself, but she certainly acknowledges that there is this other dimension of life that some people can sense. |
| Brook | Yeah. I wonder too if I think about being Rosie, if that would have, as much as she would hate to admit it, if that would encourage her to contact her family. She does the opposite in the story. She just like, you know, really does not want to go there. |
| Brook | But I almost wonder if I would be like, I need to talk at least to my sister. Cause she’s kind of close to her, her sister. Like I want to share this, like have somebody else who knows what I know talk through this. I don’t know. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I and she does have a conversation with her sister, but she’s quite abrupt and it was her sister who initiated it. Right. But yeah, I i wonder, Brook, if you wouldn’t just try and just try and reconcile kind of what what’s going on because she also ah later in the book sees Willa’s ghost right who warns her and she does take that warning, right. But she doesn’t take her sister’s warning. Her sister says, I keep having this dream where you’re being drained by a vampire. Right. |
| Brook | Living in a castle. |
| Sarah | Living in a castle being drained by a vampire. And she’s just moved into this old, large building that, you could imagine was castle like in terms of the amount of space that it took up in New York. And yeah, so she doesn’t, she doesn’t listen to her sister. She doesn’t even really want to think about what her sister might mean. Maybe enough has happened by the time that she sees Willa. She does recognize that she’s being warned. Yeah, that’s a great question, Brook. well What would you do there? |
| Sarah | What would you do? So there’s a couple of occasions in which she can’t reach her husband and this is towards the end of the book. Her husband is supposed to be on set in upstate New York. Can’t get a hold of him. Um, also can’t get a hold of her lawyer who happens to be her husband’s ex and so Rosie then goes to the ex’s apartment and talks her way in. She’s got a key because in the past she’s looked after the cat. What would you do? |
| Brook | Yeah, I mean, my assumption would be those two ran off together, right? So I think I would try a little harder to get in contact with them. But at the same time, I do feel for Rosie, her other ally who is Max, her editor is not helpful at this point, he’s been fired. And so he’s, you know, kind of having his own issues. But you know I could imagine myself calling anyone that I know that works with Chad and trying to figure out where they are because that was where my my mind would go. I mean it’s mentioned throughout the book that they used to be a couple and now they’re both gone. um Yeah what would you do Sarah? |
| Sarah | Yeah, I mean, she’s got the key. Yeah, I probably would at least try and check out the apartment and and she does learn a fair amount of information in doing that, right? She finds this phone that um Olivia has and realizes that a lot of people who have claimed not to have known each other actually did. She sees a um at an art opening, I think Dana’s art opening, there are some of the neighbors are there and other people who have all claimed that they didn’t know each other previously. |
| Sarah | So that’s a piece of information. And then also she discovers that Max and Olivia are having a relationship. Not that that is a particularly important um piece of information for the story, like that’s not, it’s actually not um relevant to the story, but I think it’s just for her another example of people keeping information from her. |
| Brook | Yeah, she’s definitely on the outside of so much that’s happening. |
| Sarah | So, Brook, when Rosie is feeling pretty lost towards the end of the book. She can’t get a hold of her husband, can’t get a hold of the lawyer, can’t get a hold of Max. She goes next door to Charles and Ella for a little bit of support. Would you have suspected them at any point? |
| Brook | I think that Unger does a really good job of camouflaging them. I mean I definitely had my suspicions, and I think Rosie does too. Something just feels off. But I could definitely see myself turning to Ella. I mean, she’s like a motherly age to me and I’m just needing some support. They’re right next door. You know, they’ve been, they’re that couple that’s been married forever and whatever’s going on with Chad, like what do I do? I need some help. So yeah, I could see myself falling into that trap. |
| Sarah | Yeah, and too late, she realizes that they are behind a lot of what’s been going on. So after Charles and Ella their trial is in the process of of happening. And so this is, you know, several months after. What they were up to has been uncovered. Rosie realizes that Chad still may not be as honest as she would like him to be. Again, she’s called by someone connected to the television production saying Chad was supposed to be here and he wasn’t. And at the same time, there’s news that the brother of his girlfriend who died, um who he was charged with and is serving time for that death, he has died in prison. And Rosie figures out that Chad is behind this man’s death in prison, as well as the girlfriend’s death and the death of his parents. |
| Brook | That’s right. So rather than Charles and Ella being behind all the deaths, she starts to put together that it’s actually two different scenarios. And um the book ends with her husband committed to her husband ends with Chad taking his own life and Rosie is left alone. |
| Sarah | Mm-hmm, yeah, because she realizes that he also killed Dana and Ivan’s nurse because the nurse had seen him coercing Ivan into signing the apartment over to them. |
| Brook | Right. |
| Sarah | So yeah, she’s left and what would you do? |
| Brook | I think that the ending is logical. She does turn back to that family that she had tried so many years to distance herself from. She didn’t want to be associated with them, but we see her at home and her sister has a baby and she’s making some inroads to to, you know, reconciling with them. And, you know, that makes sense to me. So it makes the most sense to me to, you know, try and and reconcile and be with my family and forge those relationships again. |
| Sarah | Yeah, I agree. I think, um, she sells the apartment or is in the process of selling it, which I would also be doing because I just wouldn’t want to be associated with that anymore, especially given how it became her home, right? |
| Brook | Absolutely. |
| Sarah | um And yeah, I would be just kind of reconsidering some of the decisions that I’d made. Well, Brook, this has been really fun to talk about The New Couple in 5B. I think it was a really interesting read and I was happy that we were discussing it in this way. |
| Brook | It was great, Sarah. These are always fun exercises and we hope that you enjoyed it too. Clued in mystery listeners for today. I’m Brook. |
| Sarah | And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery. |
