Michelle Richmond follows her compulsively readable fiction debut, “The Year of Fog,” with an equally addictive encore. “No One You Know” tells of a young woman struggling to come to terms with her sister’s murder. She finds that she cannot accept her sister’s death until she can find a way to accept herself.
Ellie Enderlin sees her life as separated into two parts and marks the dividing line as a Wednesday in December 1989. That was the last day her older sister Lila, a graduate student in mathematics at Stanford, left the house. Her backpack was found the following Saturday; a hiker stumbled across the body on Monday, “in Armstrong Woods, near the Russian River town of Guerneville.” The cause of death was blunt trauma to the head. The moment of separation is so sharp that it is as though Ellie’s life will be lived out in a novel of only two chapters: the years with Lila, and those without her.
The two sisters, though close, could not have been more different. Ellie remembers when she was a freshman in high school and Lila a senior: “I was the one they talked to, the one they invited to parties and asked on dates, the fun and freewheeling sister who could be counted on to organize group outings and play elaborate pranks on the teachers, but Lila was far from invisible. With her long dark hair, her general aloofness, her weird sense of humor, her passion for math, she was, I imagined, intimidating to boys in a way I would never be.”
Lila pursues mathematics with single-minded devotion. Her death cuts short what should have been a remarkable career. The crime is senseless, there are few clues and no one is ever arrested, let alone brought to justice.
Grief makes its own current; Ellie drifts through college and relationships, unable to commit. Twenty years after her sister’s death, she is working as a “cupper,” traveling the world to sample and buy coffee for San Francisco’s Golden Gate Coffee Company. She is on a buying trip in Diriomo, Nicaragua, when her path crosses that of Peter McConnell, a graduate student with Lila who was equally gifted in mathematics, and Lila’s lover.
In the days after her sister’s murder, Ellie’s primary sounding board is one of her literature professors, Andrew Thorpe. His betrayal is acute when he reveals his plans to use their conversations as fodder for his literary debut, a true crime novel entitled “Murder by the Bay.”
He paints a family torn apart by the death of the “good daughter,” the high-achieving Lila. And though the police never came close to an arrest, he names McConnell as the likely perpetrator. The motive? Jealousy and greed for sole credit for his work with Lila.
The meeting between McConnell and Ellie isn’t pure chance, and McConnell uses the opportunity to tell Ellie he didn’t kill her sister. He plants enough of a seed of doubt that Ellie is willing to question some of Thorpe’s conclusions. Once that ball starts rolling, there is no stopping it. If Ellie has to face that perhaps Thorpe fingered the wrong man as a murderer, perhaps the things he’d said about the family in general and Ellie in particular are also suspect.
Richmond’s narrative alternates among Ellie’s memories of her sister, her conversations with Thorpe, her unmoored grief with the present, McConnell’s challenge, and the facts that finally reveal the truth. And though the story jumps around, it is nicely structured. The reader, tantalized forward, is not confused by disparate pieces of information.
Richmond takes a singular approach in “No One You Know.” The story is propelled by the mystery surrounding Lila’s death, the who- done-it and why. But the central narrative is more focused on emotional truths than on solving a crime.
Ellie, through her first-person narrative, explores sibling relationships, grief and how these impact her view of who she is. The exploration isn’t necessarily subtle, but there are some big ideas wrapped in accessible language and pushed forward at a good, readable pace.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
Fiction
No One You Know, by Michelle Richmond, $23
