Murder, Forgotten - Deb Richardson-Moore

[sholio]

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,

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!

Comments

[yhlee]

WAIT, there's a short story that is not unreliable narrator as such but there is definitely an unreliable major character in a way that I thought was really compelling. I'm trying to track it down because I don't remember the author/title, only that I found out about it because James Davis Nicoll reviewed it and it was available in audiobook format. AUGH, off to hunt it down.

[yhlee]

FOUND IT, I belatedly remember it was a...radio play or something??? or maybe TV something???

Clean Escape

A dying Dr. Deanna Evans refuses to believe that her patient, Robert Havelmann, cannot remember the last 25 years of his life. It remains unclear why she has been so obsessed with this particular patient until the final, shocking conclusion.

The Wikipedia article has more (NOTE: it spoils everything)

″A Clean Escape″ is a 1985 science fiction short story by American writer John Kessel. The story was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in May 1985, and later adapted into a play by author in 1986. It features a psychiatrist attempting to cure a special patient of his amnesia. Slowly, as the patient regains his memory, more and more secrets are revealed about who this person is and the truth about their civilization as a whole.

So, not quite this trope in that it's not the narrator who's unreliable as such, but it was close enough to the trope that I really liked it.