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On a coffee-buying trip to Nicaragua, Ellie encounters a man she used to know, one who shared her past with her dead sister. Ellie has been searching for him for the better part of two decades, believing him implicated in her sister‛s murder. Ellie‛s mind returns in time to when her sister was alive. Ellie was always the sister determined to have a good time. Lila was the studious one who didn‛t have much time for boyfriends - not until shortly before her death, and then she never told Ellie who he was. After Lila‛s death, an English professor in whom Ellie had confided wrote a true crime best-seller, which accused a colleague of Lila‛s of having killed her. It didn‛t matter to the world at large that book contained little in the way of substantive proof or that the police never charged the man. His academic career was effectively over and he disappeared. Both Ellie and Lila are betrayed by the author, Andrew Thorpe. Ellie had thought she was pouring out her heart to a friend, never realising the "friend" would use all her confidences to construct a best seller. Lila‛s memory is betrayed in that it is her story that Thorpe exploits. Ellie has never forgiven him and now she resolves to discover the actual murderer and put an end-stop to the family tragedy. This is a very convincing book. The characters are wonderfully credible, from the ruthless writer who takes advantage of the naive girl, bereft of her sister, through both girls themselves, the ruined academic and, eventually, the killer himself. The divergence of the lives of the family of the sisters from what would have been had Lila not been killed to what eventuated, even to the extent of the career selected by Ellie, is interesting, to say the least. There is even a suggestion about what might have happened in the field of mathematics had Lila not died. The characters in the book are very strong, very convincing, from the false friend who writes the book and condemns an innocent man to exile through to the sisters themselves. At one stage I found myself musing on what impact the dead girl would have had on the world of mathematics had she lived. A friend of mine who read the blurb for the book voiced a fear that I suppose some readers might share - does the inclusion of the math slow the development of the plot at all? My answer to that is "Definitely not." Every aspect of the book is seamlessly developed and the reader is held to the very end.
Reviewed by Denise Pickles, September 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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