The Last Thing She Remembers

April 1, 2019
At the start of this unevenly paced psychological thriller from British author Monroe (Find Me), a woman claiming not to know who she is shows up at the cottage of Laura and Tony Masters in a Wiltshire village. The woman seems to know everything about the cottage the newlyweds recently bought, but nothing about herself. Though she believes she just arrived from Berlin, she lacks any identification, and her suitcase contains only clothing. The woman’s distraught appearance and amnesia touches the Masters, especially Tony, who decides to call her Jemma. It’s “just a name,” Tony tells her, though he may have been subconsciously thinking of a young woman named Jemma Huish who murdered her best friend 12 years earlier and was recently released from prison. The plot stalls while the woman, who accepts the Masters’ invitation to stay with them temporarily, and the locals all try to discover her identity. Eventually, plenty of secrets and hidden agendas emerge on the way to the fascinating denouement. The story’s surprises more than compensate for the lack of memorable characters. Agent: Will Francis, Janklow & Nesbit.

May 1, 2019
A young woman shows up in a small Wiltshire village sure of nothing but her home. But when she rings the bell, the house is inhabited by a couple who say they've never seen her. They invite her to spend the night, hoping a good night's sleep will bring her memory back. She awakens still with a blank canvas, but this time locals think she may be a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. Turns out several men in the village have a personal interest in her story, motivated by very different desires. Like Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train (2015) or S. J. Watson's Before I Go to Sleep (2011), Monroe's latest novel (following Find Me, 2017) features a main character whose unreliability is itself unreliable. Fans of dark domestic fiction will be entertained.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)