"Sister" by Rosamund Lupton

Beatrice's sister goes missing days after giving birth to a still-born child. Is her art college tutor the father of the baby; has he murdered her? Did her psychologist fail to diagnose puerperal psychosis? Are the gene therapy trials a front for something more sinister? Or was she being stalked by Simon, a fellow student, for his photography project?

Although the narration, jumping back and forwards from Beatrice's confessional-style testimony at the Crown Prosecution Service to telling the story of her sleuthing, is rather off-putting there is plenty in this twisting tale to grip hold of. Until the end. I'd guessed what happened about a quarter of the way through and there was a lot of subsequent evidence that confirmed my solution. But I was wrong. Really? I don't think so. My solution was far better. There were a number of pieces of evidence that the author's thrilleresque solution simply failed to address. So I still think I was right and the author wrong. Perhaps there should be a sequel about this appalling miscarriage of justice.

And before that there were a lot of moments when professional people really didn't behave anything like the way professional people would behave.

Some great lines:

• "The Big Apple with no core." (p 6)
• "A siren is the sound of the twenty-first-century cavalry on its way." (p 52)
• Psychiatrists are "a hot cycle for the personality, shrinking you down to something that fits a category in a textbook" (I guess that's why they're called shrinks).
• "A hospital world with its own no-weather and no-time in which the aberrant crises of pain, illness and death were Kafka-like turned ordinary." (p 159)
• "For me life has always been a mountain - sheer-faced and perilous." (p 227)
• "I saw compassion on some faces as they looked at me, and its poorer cousin pity on others." (p 248)

April 2018; 358 pages

Rosamund Lupton has also written the brilliant and tautly-paced Three Hours.