Every book in the Seven Sisters series follows the life of an individual member of the fictional D’Apliese family, each sister having been adopted into the family many years before. Each one focuses on the current day timeline, while reverting back to firsthand accounts of events that took place generations earlier. Readers are taken all over the world, to recognisable landmarks, famous names, and some crucial historical turning points throughout the twentieth century. You can’t read these books in a hurry as they take their time to unravel their accounts, and even longer to show how they all link together.

From the very beginning, the story has obvious gaps left wide open for us to be curious about and so we know there is more to this family than first meets the eye. For a mystery geek like me, that meant that right from the beginning I kept a running list of questions that I needed answering, and I wasn’t disappointed. Some of the mysteries are wrapped up in each individual book, and others had to wait until the final book to be confirmed.

There are two things to overlook while reading them. One is how far-fetched these connections seem to be - you just need to suspend your disbelief and roll with it. The final book does a great job of helping us understand why it’s okay to just accept how things happened. The other thing is the quality of the dialogue, both between the characters and internally for each protagonist. I found it really grating and cliched, which is why these are not five star books for me. But the stories themselves, the research that clearly went into them, and the kind of master plan required for all of them individually and together - that’s what’s deserving of the time to read all of these books, and what made me immediately go back and devour them all again as soon as I’d finished the last one!