Stevie‘s review of Have You Seen Me? by Kate White
Contemporary Thriller published by Harper Paperbacks 28 Apr 20
Memory loss can be absolutely terrifying to experience, for all that it’s a commonplace – many would say overused – romance trope. No wonder, then, that it’s also a staple of the horror and thriller genres as the afflicted protagonist attempts to piece together the missing hours or days and find an explanation for their erasure, even as external forces conspire to prevent that happening. In this story, our heroine initially finds herself missing several years of her life, acting out her morning routine as if she were still working for a former employer. However, once she accepts that she’s in the wrong office building, and receives the all-clear as regards her physical health, she is able to remember all but the events of the past few days. Even that, though, is disturbing, since there is evidence to suggest someone has sustained an injury, and with no recollection of who, what, or how this possible accident happened, Ally has no way of knowing whether she was witness, victim, or perpetrator.
In spite of being advised to stay home and rest, in the hope that she will either regain her remaining memories or come to terms with their permanent loss, Ally sets out to discover what happened to her in those missing days. She hires a private investigator to help her, but also does a fair bit of detective work of her own, particularly after the man working for her vanishes himself. All the clues point to Ally’s amnesia having been caused by a shock and trying to establish whether that happened because of, or separate from, the putative accident she was involved in leads to Ally interrogating her memories of another shocking incident: this time one that happened in her childhood.
On her way home from school, Ally had taken a forbidden route and stumbled across the body of a murdered child. Fearing punishment, she had told her parents and the police a slightly amended version of events, leading to her memories from that time becoming confused with the sanitised version, until the current incident allows her to regain control and accept the true timeline of what happened. As Ally investigates both periods of memory dysfunction, it becomes clear someone wants to stop her uncovering the truth, endangering both Ally’s life and the lives of those around her.
I liked Ally a lot and could fully sympathise with young Ally’s bending of the truth, even as the adult Ally felt guilt at not having been fully honest with the police – potentially allowing a killer to go free. I also liked her resourcefulness as she tried to retrace her steps of the missing days from the few scraps of information available to her. I was less keen on her husband, who seemed to be a thorough waste of space, and more than a little disappointed at the book’s final showdown, which seemed to come from rather left-field compared to the hints we seemed to have been getting up to that point. Still, I enjoyed all the questions that were posed regarding the nature and reliability of our memories under different types of pressure. Not a perfect book, all in all, but still an author I’d be happy to read again.
Grade: B
Summary:
On a cold, rainy morning, finance journalist Ally Linden arrives soaked to the bone at her Manhattan office, only to find that she’s forgotten her keycard. When her boss shows, he’s shocked to see her—because, he explains, she hasn’t worked there in five years.
Ally knows her name, but is having trouble coming up with much beyond that, though after a trip to the psychiatric ER, she begins to piece together important facts: she lives on the Upper West Side; she’s now a freelance journalist; she’s married to a terrific man named Hugh. More memories materialize and yet she still can’t recall anything about the previous two days. Diagnosed as having experienced a dissociative state, she starts to wonder if it may have been triggered by something she saw. Could she have witnessed an accident—or worse—had something happened to her?
Desperate for answers, Ally tries to track where she spent the missing days, but every detail she unearths points to an explanation that’s increasingly ominous, and it’s clear someone wants to prevent her from learning where those forty-eight hours went. In order to uncover the truth, Ally must dig deep into the secrets of her past—and outsmart the person who seems determined to silence her.
Read an excerpt.
