After Work - Sister

If you were told your sister committed suicide, would you believe it?  If you grew up sharing everything with your sister?  If your sister were full of “joie de vivre”?  If she had a new baby?  If she were frightened out of her mind?  If the police, her doctor and your fiancé all thought it was the most reasonable explanation of circumstances?

Bee can’t believe it. The voice from her heart drowns out the external voices of reason. Her persistence in searching for the murderer of Tess is the story in Sister, the first novel by Rosamund Lupton. 

As an adult, Bee feels herself to be an absent but caring older sister.  She has moved to New York for a good job, and she has become engaged to a worthy fellow.  However, a call in the night about her sister’s murder brings her flying first class back to London, regardless of her fiancé’s assurances that she could wait one more day for a better flight.  This is the first perceptible crack in the ultra-reasonable Bee.

All is well, although heart-wrenching and saturated with guilt, until the preliminary conclusion of murder is changed by the police - to suicide under the influence of drugs.  Nothing in Bee accepts this. 

Since no one else will, she abandons job and fiancé to stay in Tess’s seedy London flat and to investigate the murky circumstances of Tess’s death.  She plunges into the confusing world of patronizing medical consultants, her sister’s odd friends, skeptical police officials, and poverty-stricken expectant mothers. Bee is haunted by Tess’s art works because they chart her life’s momentum from buoyant colours to dark, dangerous monochromes.  Surrounded by the chaotic belongings of her sister, Bee stays on and on in the flat, exhausting her considerable funds but unable to assuage the creeping conviction that she is right and everyone else is wrong.  Until she too feels the dark threat that drove Tess beyond reason.