Clara has what seems an enviable life: she’s a professor at a Manhattan University; she’s financially independent; she’s engaged to a handsome and successful scientist named Anthony; and she’s perceptive about everything except the people closest to her. Where they are concerned, she’s very much in the shadows.

Take, for instance, her sister, Maxie. The two sisters are opposites, physically – their mothers used to describe them as “the yin and yang of loveliness” – and temperamentally. Where Clara is quiet, orderly, intraverted, and sensible, Maxie lives the messy, fragile life of a wannabe actress; she smokes heavily and has a string of disastrous relationships with one bad news bear after another. Clara, usually non-judgmental of people, is so irritated by her sister that she becomes passive-aggressive in all their interactions. Even when Maxie gives Clara an introduction to the world’s greatest living authority on Mary Shelley, a woman named Kay McNally, Clara initially fixates on Maxie’s flippancy instead of feeling gratitude. Kay becomes Clara’s surrogate older sister. Together, they try to tease out details of Mary Godwin Shelley’s life from a cache of letters. The reader has the advantage here, for the other story thread tells us the very details Clara will never discover. We get to see the influences that shape Mary’s life and writing, and the unfolding, forbidden romance between young Mary and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly.

Then there is Clara’s blindness where Anthony is concerned, which is all the more ironic as she has the example of Dr. Frankenstein right before her. The mania for the mastery of death that inspired Mary Shelley’s protagonist has mastered Anthony. He just takes a more modern approach.

Rendell’s writing is limpid, it transports you and transfixes you. The story arc of the sisters’ evolving relationship is wonderfully told and just might prove cathartic for readers with siblings. In addition, Rendell contrasts Anthony’s quest for immortality with Kay’s acceptance of her immanent death from cancer and her efforts to maximize her joy in her remaining days. The author does not flinch from showing that pain, sorrow, and loss are indeed dreadful; at the same time she depicts the power love and mystery can exert on our lives, and even our deaths.

Is there a middle ground between an insane desire to live forever, regardless of costs and consequences, and suffering lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short”? If so, surely the middle way will be wide enough to include Kay’s approach, but it might also hold the sort of advances that Anthony pursues misguidedly. Where Anthony goes wrong is in forgetting that how you pursue your goals always affects the outcome. ~~ Chris Paige