Forget Me Not by A.M. TaylorMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
January 2008 - Seventeen year old Nora Altman drives off into the night in her father's car and disappears. The car is found in the early hours of the morning by the side of the highway, not far from her home in the small,isolated community of Forest view. The car is locked,the tank is empty and there are no signs of a struggle. The teenager has just disappeared.
January 2018 - Every year Nora`s family,friends and the community hold a memorial service in her honour. The day after the 10th anniversary of her disappearance,the body of Nora`s younger sister Noelle is discovered in the trees not far from the exact location where Nora`s car was discovered. The police and many others in the town refuse to accept that the two cases are connected but Nora`s best friend Maddie Fielder has spent ten years living with her guilt about her best friend's disappearance and is determined to uncover what really happened on that cold winters morning so many years ago.
Noelle`s killer is hiding in plain sight but is Nora dead or has she simply ran away and will Maddie be able to cope when she learns what really happened to Nora?
This gripping,character driven thriller is voiced entirely by Maddie from the first person perspective. The story is set mainly in the present day but inserted into some of the chapters are italicised segments that are set in the past that cover interactions between Maggie and Nora before she disappeared and the affects her disappearance had on Maggie,their families,friends and the community.There was extracts from articles in the papers that were written by a unscrupulous journalist who had made her name out of Nora`s disappearance and was now back stirring up trouble and causing the community to turn on each other. There was also comments,discussions and speculation about both cases that had been posted on a blog about Nora`s disappearance. Although I admired Maddie`s determination to uncover what had happened to her friend,I also struggled to like her at times especially in the sections set in the past where she came across as self centred,selfish and thoughtless. She seemed to have really loved her friend but was she more than she seemed. Why was she so desperate to uncover the truth? Did she know more about Nora`s disappearance that she was revealing and was just doing everything in her power to keep her own secrets from being uncovered? In Forest View,as in any small community everyone knew everyone else's business,you couldn't blow your nose without the news spreading like wildfire.The secondary characters who lived there were a mixed bag of vivid,realistic individuals, many of whom seemed a bit too eager to accept that Nora had simply just left of her own accord.
It's not a fast paced story but it does have some unexpected twists and turns,keeps you guessing and turning the pages desperately wanting to know what happened to Nora and who killed Noelle but at the same time not wanting the story to end. I really enjoyed this well written debut thriller and look forward to reading more books by this author in the future.
Maddie,” Ange said over the phone, her voice a breathless straight line.
“Yeah?” I said, suddenly sitting up a little straighter. There was something about the shape of her voice that instantly shook me, old memories rattling around in my ribcage making my heartbeat pick up.
“I … I—”
“Ange, what’s going on? What’s happened? Are you okay?” My voice was snappy and sharp, but I couldn’t help it, I knew where conversations like that went and my fear translated to frustration all too easily.
“I was just driving through town to come get you and all these police cars passed me.”
There was no way I could have possibly known, so of course I thought of Nora, blindly following my memory back, racing those cop cars as fast as they could go to a morning so vivid it could have happened yesterday.
I could feel the same grip of panic and loss that had folded and tightened itself around me ten years before when I said to Ange: “Where were the police cars going?”
“They were headed towards the old highway, so I turned round and followed them because—” Because that was where Nora’s car had been found, and Ange was a reporter and certain habits are hard to break.
“Are you there now? What’s going on? Is it Nora?”
“Mads, it’s not Nora. It’s not Nora, but there’s a body and I think … I think it’s Nora’s sister, Noelle.”
All the air I had in my body was pulled out of me and replaced with lead, or granite, or concrete, or something heavy and immovable that dragged me down, down, down. My vision swam, images of Elle rising to the surface. She’d looked so young at the memorial and yet so weary, the weight of the world crowding her shoulders. How could this be happening again? A little over a week earlier I’d met her at CJ’s, treating her to a hot chocolate which had always been her favorite. She’d been filled with a razor-edge energy, cracking jokes and telling me stories about her girlfriend, Jenna, but then something had shifted in her and she’d started asking me questions about Nora. I’d put it down to the anniversary coming up so soon and had been happy to answer them. Normally when anyone talked about Nora I clenched up, went into lockdown, but it was different with Elle. I didn’t have to guess what her motives were when she brought Nora up, unlike with so many other people who just wanted to indulge in their morbid curiosity, to gossip about a missing girl as though she were a celebrity spiraling out of control.
I closed my eyes and tried to keep that picture of her in my mind: sitting in a booth at CJ’s, skimming the edge of her mug with her forefinger so that a pile of whipped cream and mini marshmallows appeared there before she stuck it in her mouth, while I groaned in faux disapproval and she grinned wickedly at me. I wanted to hold it there forever, but I knew how quickly that memory, that moment, would be eroded, degraded, twisted and turned into something else. I knew how quickly she’d go from Elle—the girl I’d helped teach how to ice skate and rollerblade and who’d hated to lose at Scrabble but still tried her best to win every time—to yet another person I’d be forced to mourn.
I was struggling to keep my head above the water when Ange said: “Mads, are you there?”
“Yeah,” I gasped. “I’m here.”
She talked me through what she was looking at: two cop cars and an ambulance. She recognised most everyone at the scene, including Bright and Leo and Leo’s father, Chief Moody. She knew better than to ask me if I was okay, and I knew better than to ask her. She spoke slowly, taking her time, but each word was weighed, freighted down and heavy. She’d spent a couple of years on the crime desk of a Milwaukee paper when she first graduated, but had since moved to the news desk, where if a grisly or interesting crime came up, it was invariably scooped up by one of her colleagues still working on crime. Every time she’d had to cover the death or murder of a woman or girl she saw Nora was all she had said to me at the time; it was all she needed to say. But she was clearly trying to pick up the pieces of her training there, still a reporter at heart, even as she tried to make sense of something that would never make any sense.
“And you’re sure it’s Elle?” I asked eventually, my voice small and young-sounding in the enveloping warmth of my parents’ kitchen.
“I don’t know for sure obviously, but I overheard the cops talking. They all know her, Mads, they know what she looks like. It must be her.”
I nodded, even though she couldn’t see. There wasn’t a single officer on our police force who wouldn’t know who Noelle Altman was.
“I have to go, Leo’s coming over. I think he’s going to ask me to leave.”
“Okay,” I said.
There was a small beat and then, “Should I still come over?”
“Yes,” I said, even though both of us knew we wouldn’t be leaving Forest View anytime soon.
AUTHOR BIO
A.M. Taylor lives and writes in London. When not making up stories, she writes copy for a living and can most often be found drinking coffee, watching Netflix, and trying to keep up with a never ending TBR pile. She’s been obsessed with mysteries ever since Nancy Drew first walked into her life and would probably have attempted to become a private detective at some point, if only it didn’t involve actually having to talk to people. She has a cat called Domino, ambitions of owning a dog one day, and is as obsessed with My Favorite Murder as you probably are. You can also find her at www.anniemaytaylor.com and as @author_amtaylor on Twitter and Instagram
E-BOOK PUBLICATION DATE : 5th October 2018
PAPERBACK PUBLICATION DATE : 13th December 2018
PUBLISHER : Harper Impulse/Killer Reads
Genre : Psychological Thriller
PURCHASE LINK....
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07CWVPJW5/ref=s9u_simh_gw_i1?ie=UTF8&fpl=fresh&pd_rd_i=B07CWVPJW5&pd_rd_r=58281955-c828-11e8-82be-8f8941db1301&pd_rd_w=1bfgG&pd_rd_wg=29UWe&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=&pf_rd_r=NKGBCT64NMH6H9HPKMXB&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=c94b10e6-5d13-4277-941a-22d2451d77f4&pf_rd_i=desktop
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