Sister

Sister is a captivating novel from Rosamund Lupton that digs deep into the bonds of sisterhood. Beatrice, living in New York, gets a call from her mother one day telling her that her younger sister Tess has gone missing. Tess was also pregnant and due in three weeks' time. Bee immediately hops on the next plane to London to go be with her family and find out what happened to her sister.

Shortly after arriving home, Tess' body is found in an old public bathroom in Hyde Park, with her wrists slashed. Even after the autopsy turns up with a result of suicide, Beatrice refuses to believe that her sister would ever kill herself. When everyone including her mother and fiance give up and believe that Tess is dead, Beatrice takes it upon herself to find out the truth about what happened and she begins looking for a killer.

As Beatrice takes on the investigation, she learns that there was so much more to her sister's life that she didn't know about and maybe she didn't know Tess as well as she thought she did. She finds out that Tess' pregnancy was the result of her having an affair with a married man. Tess had also found out that her baby had cystic fibrosis and had undergone experimental gene therapy to replace the bad gene with the good one. However, she had already delivered the baby some time before her death and the child was a stillborn. Beatrice was devastated to find out that her sister had delivered a baby and hadn't even told her. This however, made her even more determined to stay on the trail of resolving her sister's death. There was so much she didn't know and she needed to figure it out if she was to get any sort of closure.

As time ticks on, the police become irritated with Beatrice as she harps on about new clues surrounding her sister. They believe the case should be closed and ruled as a suicide, but Beatrice is relentless. Lupton does an amazing job of portraying the unshakable bond between sisters and shows how it really goes beyond just DNA. Although this book is technically a crime novel, it doesn't read the same way that others in its genre do. Sister has a much more serene way of storytelling to it. I'm looking forward to reading more by this author!