According to the police report, Tess killed herself due to postpartum depression after giving birth to a still baby. Intense and absorbing from the very first page, SISTER is as much a tender exploration of the complicated, twisty, messy love between sisters, as it is an utterly gripping and compelling thriller…A haunting and accomplished debut.

The pieces of the puzzle don’t add up for Beatrice, and with how Tess cherished her life, she would never commit suicide voluntarily. The suspense crackles, and the twists come thick and fast, but - more than that – it has a touching poignancy that brings tears to your eyes… Written with the power and panache of a young Daphne du Maurier, it's devastatingly good, and announces the arrival of a truly original talent. It’s one of those books where the full story is only revealed right at the very end, and even then you have to think, digest, re-read sections and digest some more before you’re hit by its full impact and meaning. Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.Ruth Jones, author and actress, said 'It's gob-smackingly, heart-stoppingly, breath-holdingly brilliant. With its gripping complexity and heart-wrenching passion, the story had about it the same unforgettable intensity of "The Lovely Bones".

Some other Goodreads reviewers, I notice, appeared to find this annoying, but I thought it pretty breathtaking, and take my hat off to Lupton's narrative skills. Bee slowly develops the gumption to defy everyone who accepts the suicide theory, including her mother, her fiancé, Tess’s psychiatrist, and the police. We are conjoined by hundreds os thousands of memories that silt down into you and stop being memories and become a part of who you are. A winner, as worth reading for its psychological intensity as it is for its mystery plot, not to mention the genuinely surprising twist near the end. I've since found out it's common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one amongst strangers; something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered.As spring slowly starts to reveal itself in the book, so do the mysterious facts as we inch inexorably towards the dramatic conclusion. Bee dresses differently, wears her hair differently, lives differently, and even the mother has miraculously done a complete flip and become a soft and tender mother. I know I’m a few years behind the times with this one and, in truth, I’d not come across this author before but I was sat in the hairdressers enduring the endless wait for my hair colour to take when I noticed a girl across the waiting area whose hair was a shock of foils sticking out in every direction only she didn’t look anywhere near as bored as me. There are also the devastated parents hearing the heartbreaking news and a sixteen-year-old Syrian refugee in the process of rescuing her younger brother.