THE SUN SISTER

The sixth installment of Riley’s mammoth series about the adopted daughters of an enigmatic shipping magnate.

This volume, weighing in at 500-plus pages, concerns Electra, the youngest of the six D’Aplièse sisters—each named for a star in the Pleiades constellation—who were rescued by seafaring entrepreneur “Pa Salt.” As always, the prefatory cast of characters notes that a seventh sister, Merope, is “missing.” Like her sisters before her, Electra was bequeathed clues by Pa (who died under mysterious circumstances) as to her birth origins. But Electra, a Manhattan supermodel who’s addicted to vodka and cocaine, is blasé about her personal quest. When Stella Jackson, a prominent black attorney, claims to be Electra’s biological grandmother, Riley begins the extended backstory common to all the books, this one about Electra’s ancestor. Stella’s reluctance to spill the beans all at once and Electra’s own prodigious procrastination slow the narrative just enough to maintain suspense. The tale centers on Cecily Huntley-Morgan, a white New York socialite who, on the eve of World War II, finds herself living in Kenya in a marriage of convenience to Bill Forsythe, who spends most of his time away on cattle drives with Maasai tribesmen. This situation stems from Cecily’s broken engagement in New York, which she followed with an unwanted pregnancy courtesy of a rebound rake. Rarely for this series, both storylines hold their own. Electra checks into rehab, vowing to forswear hedonism and use her fame and wealth to help addicted and underprivileged youth. The Kenyan setting, in seeming homage to Out of Africa, is colorfully atmospheric even as Cecily remains stolidly unhedonistic amid the Happy Valley set of hard-partying and dissolute British expats who surround her. The second half of the novel plumbs, with many detours and digressions and much descriptive minutiae, the mystery of how Cecily and Stella are connected and how Electra came to be abandoned.

The long-anticipated seventh book may reveal what's still missing from this series, because it certainly isn’t detail.