O's 2011 Summer Reading List

When free-spirited young artist Tess is found dead, only her sister, Beatrice, refuses to accept that she committed suicide. Beatrice's single-minded search for a killer no one else believes exists drives Rosamund Lupton's gripping epistolary crime novel, Sister (Crown). Beatrice moves into Tess's London flat to investigate her life, hoping to find clues about her death. The novel unfolds through letters Beatrice writes to Tess posthumously. Beatrice is at times a questionably reliable narrator, or maybe she's just unglued by grief: "I was in a Dali painting of drooping clocks, a Mad Hatter's tea-party time." Lupton weaves in multiple subplots (involving artists, pregnancies, and a genetics trial) and several potential killers, ensuring that readers become as worried as Beatrice, and almost as obsessed.