"NO ONE YOU KNOW" by Michelle Richmond (A)

I have read several novels during the past year having to do with sibling loss. The overriding theme of all of these novels is what happens to a close-knit and loving family consisting of two sisters when one of the sisters is inexplicably murdered. Most of these novels have been forgettable, but not this one. This is the creme de la creme of the lot, a literary gem to be culled from the book rack for your reading pleasure.

All of the novels feature families which are normal in every respect until this tragedy struck. In each instance, the loss was of the most talented of the two sisters, the one who was destined for greatness until her life was tragically cut short. The less remarkable, more normal sister is then left in an atmosphere of subtle recrimination, both on her part and from her parents. All three have to deal with the horrific, but always unspoken, thought of why this had happened to the talented daughter and not to the ordinary daughter when the other had so much to offer to the world. She is left to deal with the grief of parents who had held such high hopes for a daughter who will forever be denied her true potential.

Personal guilt and emotional loss scatter the family members apart like an exploding carpet bomb. The parents divorce and move on instead of staying in place and dealing with the trauma. Like the other novels, this story is told through the eyes of the surviving sister. It falls to her to examine past assumptions and search through unsolved clues in order to achieve a sense of closure for the sad event.

In the instance of "No One You Know," author Michelle Richmond has taken a different and much more satisfying slant on this scenario. Instead of dealing with the immediate trauma, she starts the story off eighteen years after the fact. Life has moved on for Ellie Enderlin even though the "whos" and the "whys" of her sister's murder are still indelibly burnt into her mind. After all, she had dearly loved her sister, Lila, so a huge part of her is missing as well. Then a chance meeting deep in the rain forest of Nicaragua forces her to question old assumptions.

In this richly written novel, the past and the present are beautifully interwoven into the strands of multiple plot lines where each element is perfectly matched in order to create a whole cloth of a story. By taking a long step forward in time, Richmond has added needed distance from the emotional burden of the murder which allows Ellie to view everything in a more detached manner. As a result, the author has ended up crafting a topnotch story, immensely helped by the fact that she is a very talented writer. Even when she writes about Lila's mathematical discourses (for Lila was a mathematical genius), the author makes the explanation of the subject matter interesting for those of us with little or no interest in the field.

Lila Enderlin had been a child prodigy in mathematics and in 1989 was on the verge of national recognition as a Ph.D. candidate in pure mathematics at Stanford University. She lived for mathematics and often challenged Ellie to see the innate beauty of the absolute certainty of mathematics which had so thrilled her. Her ambition was to prove Goldbach's conjecture and by so doing go down in history as the mathematician who had elevated this postulation from a conjecture to a proven theorem. Needless to say, her parents were bursting with pride at the promise of their beloved daughter.

Ellie Enderlin was bright and outgoing with many friends and therefore the mirror image of her sister, who didn't seem to have a social life. However, one morning Lila surprised Ellie by crying, something that she had never done before. She was also wearing an opal ring, obviously a gift from someone, but Lila wouldn't confide in who it was who had given her the ring. That day she never returned home from her graduate work and some time later her body was found in the woods in a distant area of town. The murder had been by blunt trauma and her beloved necklace, a gift from her sister, was missing.

Ellie and her parents were devastated, so much so that meaningful communication between them ceased and they never laughed again. A formerly warm and happy family became dysfunctional and Ellie's parents later divorced and moved away from San Francisco.

Ellie was a sophomore in college at the time, and one of her literature professors took her under his wing and gave her a shoulder to cry on. This went on for some time until he confessed to her that he was using her as source material for a novel which would be based on this unsolved murder. Ellie felt doubly betrayed because she had introduced the professor to her parents and now they felt that she had betrayed them. The family anguish was only amplified when the novel became a national best seller and Ellie had to endure the pain of seeing her private reflections in print for all the world to read.

Ellie floundered around at various jobs for many years until she fell into a niche job for which she was ideally suited. She had a very refined nose for scents and aromas and this helped her to become a successful buyer for a San Francisco coffee importer. Her career took her all over the world in a search for specialty coffees. Late one rainy night in Diriomo, Nicaragua, a stranger walks into a café, and Ellie slowly begins to realize that she knows this man from many years before. 2008, Delacourt Press, 306 pages.