Books I've read this week - No One You Know

No One You Know by Michelle Richmond ©2008. I won this book from Dawn at She Is Too Fond of Books . Thanks again Dawn!

From the book cover: “All her life Ellie Enderlin had been known as Lila’s sister – until the day Lila, a top math student at Stanford, was murdered, and the shape of the family changed forever. Twenty years later, Ellie is a professional coffee buyer who has never put down roots. When in a chance meeting she comes into possession of the notebook that Lila carried everywhere, Ellie returns home to finally discover the truth about her sister’s death – a search that will lead her to Lila’s secret lover, to the motives and fate of a man who profited from their family’s grief, and ultimately to the deepest secrets even sisters keep from each other. This is a riveting family dramas about loss, love, and the way hope redefines our lives – a novel at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down.”

Twenty years after Ellie’s sister is murdered, she runs into the suspected killer while buying coffee in Nicaragua. The tell-all book written about Lila’s murder has ruined his life, but he swears he’s innocent and Ellie tends to believe him, finally realizing that she never really believed he did it. Like everyone else, she had just believed what was written in the 'true' crime book to be based on facts. Who then, killed her sister? Going back home, Ellie starts the search for the real killer.

This was a good mystery with interesting characters and locations (San Francisco and Nicaragua). It did a good job showing how families interact before and following a tragedy.

Lila was a math genius (like the guy on the NUMB3RS television show) and the many math references and explanations went right over my head; the longer ones, I just skipped over. I do realize they helped explain the personality of Lila and others in the story. The information about Ellie’s job as a coffee buyer was very interesting. I did not like the man who wrote the tell-all book and was surprised when Ellie treated him so nicely. I thought it was interesting that book continued on for a few more chapters after the murder was solved, because the real story wasn’t the murder, it was the relationships of the people involved.