Review of THE MISSING SISTER by Lucinda Riley

 2 Stars

This is the seventh book in The Seven Sisters series to which I have been listening on my morning walks.

Six girls were adopted by Pa Salt, an ultra-wealthy man.  After he dies, each daughter is given a letter and a clue to her true heritage.   Each daughter’s journey is the subject of a novel.  This one is devoted to the seventh sister, known as the missing sister because Pa Salt never found her. 

The sisters are given a clue, a star-shaped emerald ring, which they are told will identify the missing sister.  They believe her name is Mary McDougal, and their search for her takes them to New Zealand, Canada, England, France, and Ireland.  Interspersed with their goose chase is Mary’s story.  Having fled Ireland 37 years earlier, she decides it is time to find some answers to questions that have troubled her for all that time. 

Mary, known as Merry, is not an engaging character.  She is such a bland personality.  She is almost 60 years of age, yet she has been running away for over half her life and has made no effort to determine if her fears are baseless.  She was given a diary to read but didn’t bother to read it in all that time?  She is constantly feeling overwhelmed:  every time she receives a new piece of information, she needs a drink and/or a nap.  How many times must we be told about how tired she is?  She constantly tells her son and daughter that she’ll explain things to them later.  I wanted to yell at her to grow a spine!

There are some ridiculous plot points.  The way that the sisters set out to find Mary makes no sense.  Instead of chasing her around the world, why not send an email explaining the situation?  The globetrotting seems to have been included so that each sister can take part in the hunt.  Of course their intense desire to drag a person who has no knowledge of their family to a memorial ceremony for a man she never knew is a bit bizarre. 

And the sisters come across as so stupid.  They keep insisting that Mary-Kate, Mary’s daughter, must be the missing sister.  Yet Mary is the one who owned the ring, though she gifted it to her daughter.  The fact that Mary is nicknamed Merry (to suggest Merope, one of the seven Pleiades) doesn’t give them pause to think?! 

The book is needlessly lengthy.  We are given the diary of Nuala Murphy, a young woman in 1920s Ireland.   In the previous novels, such historical documents prove to be connected to a sister’s biological family.  That is not the case here, so is the author just giving readers a history lesson about the country of her birth, specifically the Irish War for Independence from the British?  There’s a lot of information about a family who adopted Mary, so why is there so little information about Pa Salt, the man who adopted the sisters?  Don’t get me started on how little the adopted sisters know about their father!

There seems to be a lot of padding.  Every sister has to be given her moment in the spotlight and her story repeated.  So many trivial conversations should have been edited.  It’s not just what the sisters talk about, it’s their forced and unnatural way of talking that is annoying.  Dialogue is not the author’s strong suit.  And would a mother who is nursing be drinking so liberally and asking a pregnant woman to join her?

I dislike the cheap literary devices used.  At the beginning, Mary doesn’t mention the names of the important men in her life (Ambrose, Bobby, Peter) and the nature of their relationship with her.  I guess this vagueness is supposed to create suspense.  Then there’s the convenient disappearance of the family lawyer, Georg Hoffman.  He just can’t be reached for the entire time?!  I wouldn’t want him for my lawyer.  I hate allusions that are supposed to suggest a non-existent thematic depth:  are we not supposed to notice that Bobby’s surname Noiro is Orion spelled backwards?  A wrong address seems a too-easy explanation for a no-show.  And a 37-year fear is dismissed in a few sentences of dialogue.

I think the author wanted to portray the sisters as strong women so why did she feel it necessary that every female have a love interest?  Even the widowed cannot be left long without a male companion.  In this book alone, Ally, Mary-Kate, and Mary are paired with possible romantic partners. 

Readers looking for closure to the series will not find it here.  The missing sister is found, but there are so many new questions.  And does it make sense that Pa Salt would leave his story with the missing sister who might never be found and so would not be able to tell the other sisters?  The last book in the series, Atlas:  The Story of Pa Salt was released last week.  I’m conflicted about whether I can listen to this last book.  I can only hope that the author’s son, Harry Whittaker, will have avoided some of the weaknesses found in the previous installments.