Was so excited to get this on my Kindle. I take my hat off to talented Lucinda for keeping hold of all the strands as we explore the possible identity of the Missing Sister via New Zealand, France, England and Ireland. But as a long-time LR fan, it pains me to admit I found it all quite hard work.
Lucinda is usually so skilful at peppering her novels with fascinating historical snippets. Here, I felt like I was being lectured to a lot of the time, rather than learning organically as part of the story. The extensive Irish background detail is really interesting up to a point, but there was way too much of it - a lot of extraneous facts plonked in awkwardly or delivered in laboured speeches by the characters.
I can understand that Lucinda needed to tie in as many threads as possible from previous books as the series comes to a close, but there were just SO many old characters reintroduced alongside a HUGE raft of new ones that it quickly became distracting. I was however delighted by the reappearance of Orlando from Star’s story, he slotted effortlessly into the plot here. And it was lovely to catch up with some of the other sisters’ goings-on since we last saw them.
The geographical locations and ‘sense of place’ are usually a key appeal in LR books, but I didn’t feel that the locations quite came to life on the page here, particularly New Zealand. Some rather bland paint-by-numbers descriptions, sadly not up to her usual high standard. I missed the fantastic evocation of landscapes and houses in previous novels.
A big issue for me was that I didn’t really connect with Merry’s character, she seems strangely flat and generic. I felt I’d seen her before somehow, no unique personality of her own. Same with her daughter Mary-Kate. I found it hard to care about either of them, beyond wanting to know their eventual role in the plot. And the ‘Merry’ nickname – apart from being told by a couple of characters that the name is given because she is so happy and giggly, we see almost no evidence of this in Merry’s characterisation, either in the past or the present. It’s a problem when the reader has to be ‘told’ second-hand what to think of a character. The same thing happened with other pivotal characters too, most notably Bobby.
Lucinda always weaves a dual timeline into her novels and normally I absolutely love that and have no problem keeping up, but here I found it confusing. The ‘past’ sections aren’t chronological as in all previous books, they skip from 1920 to 1955 to 1960, fine, but then revert back to 1949 then back to 1921. By the time we got to the last ‘past’ section, I’d forgotten who half the characters were and had to keep referring back to the very first past section, where we last met them about 400 pages ago! It was frustrating. The fact that we weren’t following the same characters in every past section (which is what usually happens in LR books) also made it harder to emotionally invest in them.
It’s all such a shame because at the end, after I’d waded through the thick soup of characters and Irish history, there were some touching endings for some of the key players. As well as a couple of late twists that had me gasping! So it was definitely worth finishing, but I’d rather not have had to slog through so many pages of uncharacteristically lacklustre writing to get there. I’ll definitely read the newly announced Book 8 in the hope of a return to form, but sad to say I was disappointed with ‘The Missing Sister’.
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![The Missing Sister: They'll Search the World to Find Her (The Seven Sisters Book 9) (English Edition) van [Lucinda Riley]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51D0PJQtrDL._SY346_.jpg)
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