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Murder, Forgotten - Deb Richardson-Moore
This mystery/thriller has an excellent premise - an elderly writer, Julianna, suffering from dementia, loses her husband in an apparent home invasion. But she doesn't remember the night of his death, or much else surrounding that time, and has to piece together the sequence of events and try to determine whether one or more of the people around her is lying and whether one of them is a murderer.
How do you mess up a premise like that? In multiple ways, it turns out! Most egregiously,
It's pretty much all spoilery complaining under the cut.
The thing that annoyed me most about Julianna being killed halfway through the book is that it made everything which had been set up to that point just not matter anymore, such as her estrangement from her grown kids (never going to resolve that, I guess!) and the obvious but potentially interesting twist that her dementia was caused by someone close to her feeding her drugs. I was also DEEPLY annoyed that one particular red herring - Julianna thinks she saw her doctor (one of the murder suspects) in Scotland, where she had retired to recuperate after her husband's death; everyone else thinks she's hallucinating - was never actually explained! Was she actually hallucinating? We'll never know!
The actual mystery resolution .... makes less and less sense the more you think about it. Julianna writes thrillers that she often bases on real-life news stories. The killer is the subject of Julianna's latest book, trying to stop the book from being produced by - getting close to Julianna and murdering Julianna's husband in a complicated setup that was supposed to make it look like Julianna killed him in a dementia fugue state (the fact that it takes the characters half the book to even start suspecting Julianna suggests it wasn't a very good frame job) and slipping Julianna crazypills until she can no longer tell up from down. Then she fakes Julianna's suicide and ... ??? profit ???. (Honestly, if all she needed to do was stop the book's production, there was no need for the murder at all. The crazypills were plenty.)
I also feel like a lot of the unreliable narrator premise was wasted because there's very little of the book in which we really don't know what happened (aside from who actually killed Julianna's husband). There are enough witnesses and other people in the house around the time of the murder that there's no major mindfuck elements like, say, her husband wasn't even *in* the house, he died months earlier, he never existed ... etc ... but no, we know basically what happened at all times except for the actual murder itself.
Oh well, it was an entertaining read, even though it took me a while to finish it, and now I can amuse myself by thinking about how I'd do different things with the same premise. I really love unreliable narrators who are unreliable because they've had their memories messed with. Actually, if you have any recs for non-terrible books along those lines, I'd love to hear them!
How do you mess up a premise like that? In multiple ways, it turns out! Most egregiously,
Major spoiler
by killing off Julianna (in a particularly frustrating way, too) halfway through the book when she gets too close to the killer, and switching to her much less interesting daughter as the sole viewpoint character.It's pretty much all spoilery complaining under the cut.
The thing that annoyed me most about Julianna being killed halfway through the book is that it made everything which had been set up to that point just not matter anymore, such as her estrangement from her grown kids (never going to resolve that, I guess!) and the obvious but potentially interesting twist that her dementia was caused by someone close to her feeding her drugs. I was also DEEPLY annoyed that one particular red herring - Julianna thinks she saw her doctor (one of the murder suspects) in Scotland, where she had retired to recuperate after her husband's death; everyone else thinks she's hallucinating - was never actually explained! Was she actually hallucinating? We'll never know!
The actual mystery resolution .... makes less and less sense the more you think about it. Julianna writes thrillers that she often bases on real-life news stories. The killer is the subject of Julianna's latest book, trying to stop the book from being produced by - getting close to Julianna and murdering Julianna's husband in a complicated setup that was supposed to make it look like Julianna killed him in a dementia fugue state (the fact that it takes the characters half the book to even start suspecting Julianna suggests it wasn't a very good frame job) and slipping Julianna crazypills until she can no longer tell up from down. Then she fakes Julianna's suicide and ... ??? profit ???. (Honestly, if all she needed to do was stop the book's production, there was no need for the murder at all. The crazypills were plenty.)
I also feel like a lot of the unreliable narrator premise was wasted because there's very little of the book in which we really don't know what happened (aside from who actually killed Julianna's husband). There are enough witnesses and other people in the house around the time of the murder that there's no major mindfuck elements like, say, her husband wasn't even *in* the house, he died months earlier, he never existed ... etc ... but no, we know basically what happened at all times except for the actual murder itself.
Oh well, it was an entertaining read, even though it took me a while to finish it, and now I can amuse myself by thinking about how I'd do different things with the same premise. I really love unreliable narrators who are unreliable because they've had their memories messed with. Actually, if you have any recs for non-terrible books along those lines, I'd love to hear them!
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Aaaaaaaaaaaaah I have never read and will never read this book and I am frustrated! The entire point of that kind of narrator is to carry them through to the end of their story!
It is probably a spoiler even to recommend it under these circumstances, but have you read Diana Wynne Jones' Archer's Goon (1984)?
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I have, and I really liked it! Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, Jones really likes that trope. I can think of at least two other books of hers that have it (Hexwood and Time of the Ghost are the ones I'm thinking of, at least to an extent in the latter case).
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Hexwood is one of my favorites of her novels. Fire and Hemlock also, which makes use of similarly divergent memories.
The trope shows up in secondary characters as well—I'm thinking of Howl's Moving Castle and A Tale of Time City, but I know there are other examples.
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Ah, Charmed Life. I think The Lives of Christopher Chant might be my very favourite DWJ, but Charmed Life is extra special to me because it was my first encounter with her and a big part of why I swung from genre-agnostic into fantasy fan.
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