Yesterday by Felicia Yap

review by Maryom

A body has been found in the river by Grantchester meadows. The coat pockets laden with pebbles point to suicide; the bump on the head says otherwise. So the police begin investigations - but things are tricky in a world where the majority of people can only remember the events of yesterday, and the pressure is on for a speedy resolution.


This book starts with an interesting premise - that most adults only retain memories of the previous day, the lucky few remember two days - then throws in a murder mystery, but it soon lost its hold on me as it turned into a fairly predictable domestic noir.
 Although the book isn't promoted as such, I'd expected a more 'sci-fi' take to the story. After all, a whole population coping with memory problems like that would surely be really weird. How did it develop in the first place? How do people cope from day to day? Would staying awake for long periods (perhaps with the help of drugs) keep someone's memory intact or is time the factor that governs this strange condition? And how can you hope to solve a murder when the facts will start to slip away from witnesses' minds at the end of the day? The aspects which intrigued me most weren't addressed as the book is much more murder mystery than speculative fiction, and as for coping day to day, well that's solved by the use of diaries - filled in every night to make sure important events and feelings are remembered, and read every morning to convert 'memories' into 'facts' which are never forgotten. To be honest, I felt these characters probably had a better grasp of what happened last week, by referring to their diaries, than I have with only a memory to count on!
I also found it a bit bizarre that events took place in what feels like a familiar setting, Granchester Meadows - I half expected Sidney Chambers and his entourage to show up and help solve the mystery!
If you're reading this as another domestic noir, you'll probably like it well enough, but I'm not particularly fond of the genre, and, comparing it to other fiction involving memory loss, Yesterday didn't have the tension of SJ Watson's Before I Go to Sleep, total world immersion of Emily Barr's The One Memory of Flora Banks or the grittiness of the Christopher Nolan film Momento.




Maryom's review - 3 stars
Publisher - Wildfire 
Genre - domestic noir, adult fiction

Painkiller by NJ Fountain

review by Maryom

Since an accident five years ago, Monica has been in almost constant, unbearable pain. Each day she wakes up not knowing what to expect - will this be a rare 'good' day when her pain is manageable enough for her to get up, go out, live a semblance of normal life, or one of the far more frequent days when, despite the cocktail of painkillers, she ends up lying flat on her back all day, her mind made hazy by the drugs, afraid that any movement will cause agony?   One night, kept awake by pain, and looking for something to distract her, Monica finds a letter hidden away - a suicide note she'd written years before when her pain was too bad to cope with. But something doesn't ring true about it; despite her unceasing pain, despite the tricks high doses of painkillers have played with her memory, despite the handwriting appearing to be hers, despite everything her husband Dominic says, Monica finds it impossible to believe she would ever really have contemplated taking her own life. Is someone trying to mess with her mind? or maybe her seemingly loving husband, Dominic, isn't quite as caring and patient as he appears, and has been planning to kill her?

You've probably guessed, from the ambiguous title alone, that Painkiller is a tense psychological thriller with a woman fearing that someone close to her is threatening her life. It starts well, told mainly from Monica's point of view, capturing her constant pain and her equally strong determination to fight it, however she can, and of course the reader is expecting the first step of a psychological thriller - the revelation that not everything is quite as Monica believes.  Perhaps because of that, I found the middle third moved a little slowly for a thriller - it explores Monica's condition more though, and makes both it and the affects of the drugs things the reader can begin to understand. The end speeds up again, with revelations and twists coming thick and fast as the story reaches its climax.

There are definitely echoes of SJ Watson's Before I Go To Sleep, with the plot depending on huge gaps in the narrator's memory, but it's in no way a copy-cat retelling. If Watson had written this as his second book, I'd have been disappointed; as it is, in a different author's hands there's no feeling of re-visiting the same material. It's gripping, well-plotted, and that ideal thriller - a book you won't want to put down.




Maryom's Review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Sphere 
Genre - adult psychological thriller

The Loving Husband by Christobel Kent

review by Maryom

Fran Hall half-wakes one night as her husband, Nathan, comes home from the pub and climbs into bed beside her ... then, an hour or so later, she wakes fully to a scream. Finding the bed beside her empty, she goes downstairs and out into the dark farmhouse yard, where a shocking discovery awaits ... Nathan's dead body slumped in a ditch!

This psychological thriller starts on a high note, grabbing the reader's attention and curiosity, and pretty much stays that way.
As their secrets come tumbling out, Fran and Nathan soon prove to not be the ideal happy couple they seem, their move from London to the countryside something forced by Nathan rather than a joint decision and even the whole basis for their marriage suddenly seems to be in question. 
The story is told from Fran's point of view, so, while the police seem to only be investigating her as a possible suspect, we don't really know what information they have or what other lines of enquiry they might be following. She believes the police are just wasting time, not following up on all possible leads, and so decides to investigate things herself, to track down the shadowy figure she spotted across the fields on the night of the murder. .. but, to be honest, Fran seems so confused and uncertain about events of that night that it's possible to believe she could be hiding something crucial to the investigation from both police and reader, or suffering from amnesia.  
The atmosphere of flat, empty wintry fen-land is wonderfully captured, there are plenty of red herrings and dead ends, and a surprise ending, all of which add up to an excellent domestic noir style thriller.

Maryom's Review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Sphere 
Genre - adult psychological thriller

Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson

A Clean Slate
review by Maryom

Christine wakes one morning in what she believes to be a stranger's bed, but it isn't. She is at home, in her own bed, the man beside her says he is her husband Ben and that they've been happily married for many years. Christine remembers none of it - absolutely nothing after an accident 18 years ago, every night her memory is wiped clean and each day started with a blank slate. Husband Ben has a scrapbook full of photographs and memorabilia to help fill the long gap, but something doesn't feel quite right. When Christine discovers a diary, kept secretly without her husband's knowledge, recording the events of the past few weeks and the flashes of memory that have occurred, she becomes more certain that somewhere, somehow, Ben is hiding the truth.

I'd had 'tasters' of the first chapter arriving over several weeks and was frustrated at not being able to read more, so when the actual book turned up for review I lost no time in sitting down and getting on with it. Before I Go To Sleep definitely lives up to the hype going round the web about it. SJ Watson has captured how absolutely terrifying it must be to have no memory of so many years, to have no way of being certain that people are telling you the truth. Through the diary, the reader shares Christine's dilemma of wanting to accept the things Ben tells her, of wanting to believe his reasons for not sharing everything, everyday, when it will all have to be repeated the next, but finding that what he says doesn't match her intermittent memories or the diary she's started to keep.
The gradual unfolding of Christine's life makes for a tense, atmospheric thriller that drags you in and compels you to read. I was very tempted to quickly peep at the ending but just managed to resist and was glad I did!

Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Transworld
Genre - adult, crime/thriller

Other reviews; Subtle Melodrama   
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