No One You Know

For more than twenty years, Ellie Enderlin has lived in the shadow of her sister's murder. Before that, her life was overshadowed by Lila, her brilliant mathematical genius of a sister. Lila always knew her path - one that included a professional quest for proof of mathematical theorems. Ellie floundered, unsure of her direction. In the months following the murder, Ellie turned to someone she considered a friend - Andrew Thorpe, an English professor and a great listener - only to find herself betrayed when he turned her confidences into a novel that became a bestseller. In the novel, he named one of Lila's colleagues (and her lover) as the murderer. However, the police had never arrested anyone for the murder. Pursuing her own career now as a professional coffee buyer, Ellie's work takes her to far-flung places, including Nicaragua, and it is here that she first sees Peter McConnell, a self-imposed recluse who has escaped the prying eyes of those who have read about him in the book - "Murder By the Bay" - and also to distance himself from the tragedy of a life cut short. Conversing with him, Ellie learns that Lila had left behind a notebook, one that she always carried with her. It included many of her mathematical equations. When Ellie also comes to question that Peter McConnell actually committed the crime, she begins a quest - one that leads her back to San Francisco and surrounding areas, meeting and interviewing and finally arriving at her own conclusions about what happened. Will Ellie find the truth? Will the mathematical equations Lila sought to prove finally reach realization? And what will Ellie rediscover about her relationship with her sister and about her own somewhat superficial connections to others? This tale is much more than a crime novel - it is a story of life interrupted. Not just the life of the murdered girl, but the sister left behind, whose own connections with her sister were severed by another person's actions. It is also a story of betrayal, secrets and, finally, a peaceful resolution. Like Richmond's previous novel The Year of Fog (Bantam Discovery), this story, No One You Know, is gripping and compulsively readable.

I was excited to get my hands on Michelle Richmond's new book. I have really enjoyed her previous works and was really looking forward to diving into No One You Know; I was not disappointed. The story moved swiftly as it wove effortlessly through explorations into the worlds of mathematics and coffee buying. This book is a well-written tale of a family rent apart by tragedy and the journey one daughter takes to find the truth behind the loss of her sister.

Over at the Barnes & Noble First Look Book Club discussion of Stewart O'Nan's Songs for the Missing, quite a few people, including me, said they would have liked to have seen the book written from the first person perspective of the younger daughter Lindsay. I had that in mind when I read No One You Know because both books deal with a family coming to terms with the loss of an elder daughter. In the case of No One You Know, the elder daughter is Lila, a math genius, and the story is told by her sister Ellie 20 years after the tragic event. "A story has no beginning or end. Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead," Author Richmond writes. Ellie's life has been shaped by her sister's unsolved murder, and the "true crime" account of it written by a professor, Andrew Thorpe, she once intimately trusted. That book revealed Lila's math professor and secret married lover as the perp. But Ellie begins to question everything she thought was true when a chance meeting in an unlikely place yields Lila's notebook that she used to jot down mathematical equations, leading her on a search to discover what really happened that fateful night. I read an ARC of this novel which describes the book like this: "A riveting family drama about the stories we tell - a novel of astonishing depth and beauty, at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down." Jacket copy often exaggerates, but in this case I wholeheartedly agree with it. I will go out and buy a copy of this for my "keeper" bookshelf and I fully expect that this will appear on my year-end best list. Let me tell you why. The narrative is very much about how little twists of fate can alter our life stories. For example, if Ellie had let Lila take the car that Wednesday, she might still be alive, Ellie's parents might still be together, Ellie might be married and have kids by now. Stories and the endless variations of storytelling are themes in counterpoint with the very strict and exact nature of mathematics. I loved how all the pieces of the story fit together in the end like a perfect mathematical proof. Thorpe once said in one of the classed Ellie attended that "in order for a book to be really good, it's not enough to develop the major characters. The minor ones, too, have to be distinct. When readers close the book, they should remember everyone who walks across the page." I do. There is a smattering of mathematical talk that went way over my head, but I still found it fascinating. Ellie also has a very interesting job. Due to her great sense of smell, she works as a coffee cupper, looking for great coffee beans all over the world. And despite what some other reviewers have said, I enjoyed learning more about coffee. Extremely highly recommended! Read more of my reviews at presentinglenore.blogspot.com

Toward the end of this incredibly moving literary mystery, the storyteller - and Ellie is a storyteller; narrator is far too sterile a word for what is going on here - comes to the realization that stories aren't set in stone. I don't know if that is a universal truth, provable to the irrefutable certainty demanded by the mathematician characters in No One You Know, but it is clearly true about the story told in these wonderful pages. This one is set in something far richer: fertile literary soil that is at times dark, at times funny, at times heartbreaking, and, at every step, lyrical. I've been a been reader of literary fiction for more years than I care to admit, and a reader of mysteries for even longer than that, and still no novel comes to mind that, for me, combines the best of both these worlds so elegantly. In this novel of stories told and received, retold and unwound, Ellie's search for the truth about the unsolved murder of Lila, her brilliant mathematician sister, is a lovely study of passion, family, loss, and love. It left me thinking about so many things: How we love and why we fear loving. How we define ourselves and those around us, or leave those tasks to others. How important passion is to the work we choose to do. How often untruths told with confidence are received as truths, and how difficult it is to peel back the edges to get a peek behind widely accepted untruths. How much damage we sometimes do to others when we are over-focused on ourselves. No One You Know is a book I will be putting in the hands of every intelligent reader I know!