The Wicked Sister
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4.1 • 115 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
She thought she'd buried her past. But what if it's been hunting her this whole time?
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Marsh King's Daughter comes a startling novel of psychological suspense as two generations of sisters try to unravel their tangled relationships between nature and nurture, guilt and betrayal, love and evil.
You have been cut off from society for fifteen years, shut away in a mental hospital in self-imposed exile as punishment for the terrible thing you did when you were a child.
But what if nothing about your past is as it seems?
And if you didn't accidentally shoot and kill your mother, then whoever did is still out there. Waiting for you.
For a decade and a half, Rachel Cunningham has chosen to lock herself away in a psychiatric facility, tortured by gaps in her memory and the certainty that she is responsible for her parents' deaths. But when she learns new details about their murders, Rachel returns, in a quest for answers, to the place where she once felt safest: her family's sprawling log cabin in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
As Rachel begins to uncover what really happened on the day her parents were murdered, she learns--as her mother did years earlier--that home can be a place of unspeakable evil, and that the bond she shares with her sister might be the most poisonous of all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rachel Cunningham, the protagonist of this devastating, magic realism dusted psychological thriller from Dionne (The Marsh King's Daughter), has been guilt-ridden for 15 years since a twin tragedy she can't remember her mother's murder and father's apparent suicide when she was 11 at her family's vast wilderness estate on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She has voluntarily confined herself to a decaying mental institution, where one day she gains access to the original police report, obtained somehow by a fellow patient's brother, that sparks the faint hope she's not responsible for her parents' deaths and sends her back to the family estate, where her brilliant but scary older sister, Diana, and their aunt still live, to try to figure out what really happened. But Rachel's mission soon becomes far more perilous than she anticipated. Arriving unannounced at a time when both women are away, she discovers paperwork indicating that Diana is up to no good. As Rachel scrambles to remain undetected, the tension at times becomes almost unbearable, especially as the reader becomes privy to critical information unknown to Rachel via flashbacks narrated by her late mother. Dionne paints a haunting portrait of a family hurtling toward the tragic destiny they can foresee but are powerless to stop.
Customer Reviews
Solid read
Two days and it was finished.
Don’t Bother Reading (spoilers)
It’s hard to consider The Wicked Sister a mystery considering that the title is an obvious spoiler. The book is so predictable that I knew who had committed the murder within the first couple chapters (and also from just reading the title). Also, I’m tired of the amnesia tropes in thrillers; they’re neither clever nor entertaining and just come off as lazy writing. At the end of almost every chapter, the author tries to add a clever hook line or reveals new information that was remembered, but it only made me roll my eyes with how cliche and ineffectual it all was.
In The Wicked Sister’s final act it seems as though the author rushed to lazily put the last pieces of the puzzle together with a simple “oh yea i forgot about this specific detail because i have amnesia and i just happened to remembered it”, which is insulting as a reader who actually wasted their time actually finishing this unrewarding book.
A lot of reviewers mentioned that there was a lot of animal mutilation that upset them but I thought it was just a device to add shock value and it was actually one of the very few things to shock me in this book. It didn’t turn me away.
Oh yea and the protagonist can also talk to animals for some reason???? Why not?
So, it’s not the Marsh Kings Daughter
I really enjoyed her previous work. This book seems to be contrived and a bit silly. The author has talent and, I believe, will have many more books that are worthy of her ability. Too many flaws in the logic of the characters. Too many convenient and unbelievable surprises.