Forget My Name

Seahorse Brain
The Last Thing She Remembers is an exciting suspense thriller that rockets from character to character, taking the unreliable narrator trope up a notch or two. A woman takes a train to Wiltshire, an English village, and goes to a house, knocking on the door, claiming she lives there and that she does not remember her name. She does not remember anything about her life. Worse, each new day is a clean slate requiring her to keep notes from day to day so she can remind herself what happened. The homeowners are Tony and Laura and have owned the house a while. At first, Laura is welcoming, but when Tony suggests the stranger looks like a Jemma and the local doctor wonders if she could be Jemma Huish who used to live in that house, Jemma killed her best friend and lived in a hospital and half way house. She is famous for calling the police before committing the crime. What I loved about this book was that the unstable narrative made you unsure of where the story was going. You were hoping that it was Jemma on one page and confused at what is going on in the next. The local's anxiety makes Jemma doubting herself and her memory.

Irresponsible police and dire public warnings put the newly minted Jemma on the run, seeking help from Tony whose own fears of hereditary Alzheimer's makes him fascinated by memory and memory loss, thus fascinated by Jemma. Half the book is where Jemma spends time with the town and the other half is Jemma running away with Tony and the police and a local reporter chase the two of them. There is plenty of misdirection in The Last Thing She Remembers and all of it is perfectly fair. Because it is so fair, we perhaps begin to discern the outlines of a scheme at play. Or more accurately, more than one scheme. The plot never stops adding to the tension, propelling the reader forward and compelling us to keep reading without stop. No sleep for you! I finished it in one day. There is plenty of misdirection in The Last Thing She Remembers and all of it is perfectly fair. Because it is so fair, we perhaps begin to discern the outlines of a scheme at play. Or more accurately, more than one scheme. The plot never stops adding to the tension, propelling the reader forward and compelling us to keep reading without stop. I think the only place that it falls short is the epilogue after epilogue. One longer chapter tying everything together would have been perfect. Thank you to Netgalley and all parties involved for my arc of this thriller. I will be reading more of this author for sure.