Wanda Dellas is found washed up in a river with a gunshot wound to the head. She’s pregnant. She survives but now has no long term memory. Struggling to find her place in the world she becomes convinced she is living the wrong life. And the life she is leading, bringing up a child with little money and no sense of a past, is a struggle. When she sees a news report about Claire Stanbrick, a successful businesswoman who went missing at the same time as Wanda was found and to whom she bears more than a passing resemblance, she wonders if that person is actually her. When Wanda starts digging for the truth she uncovers some dark secrets. Will snooping around just make things worse for her and her daughter Astrid?
Lisa Sherman’s FORGET ME is an enjoyable contemporary mystery in the same vein as thrillers with strong female leads such as Gone Girl and The Girl On The Train. Sherman utilizes a split narrative with the story revealed by both Wanda and Claire. Their characters are well developed, especially the humdrum daily life of Wanda and her child, and the dialogue, though sometimes just a touch too “on the nail” in terms of plot development, is realistic. It’s a slow build and Sherman’s prose excels in establishing place. If anything there is perhaps a little too much time spent setting up the mystery at the heart of the novel and not enough instilling urgency and drama to the proceedings. The unreliable narrator is a useful literary technique in building novels that want to withhold information, or dangle red herrings, in order to supply the requisite plot twists. Sherman’s prose is frequently too reliant on telling not showing and there are a few plot holes that a surprise or fortuitous coincidence cannot really paper over. It’s a fine line that an author needs to trace in plotting a sophisticated thriller that satisfactorily delivers sudden unexpected twists and Sherman oversteps that a few times. There are moments that readers may feel they have been short-changed by key details being withheld or even feel that, in retrospect, they have been unconvincingly misled.
Author Lisa Sherman is excellent at building characters in her debut mystery novel, FORGET ME, an entertaining page-turner with an intriguing plot and the first in a series.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader