Saturday, March 18, 2023

Remember Me Gone, by Stacy Stokes

Tumble Tree is such a remote small town that there is no cell service.  All it has going for it is the mine where half of the town is employed and Memory House.  Memory House is the outfit that Lucy's father runs:  a place where people go to forget their troubles.  Dad is a unique skill:  he's able to erase people's bad memories, leaving them free to go on with their lives unburdened by what they want to forget.

But something is not quite right.  Lucy keeps having flashes of memories that don't make sense and periods of time for which she can't account.  People are giving her vague answers and tell her things that can't be true.  Someone's hiding something and going to great pain to do so, and it's almost as if someone like her father has been wiping her memories.  However, Lucy knows that her Dad would never practice on an unwilling person.  It all seems to center around the mines and the mayor.  Lucy and the mayor's nephew, Marco feel that they are tantalizingly close to uncovering the mystery, but plagued by the sense that they may have been in this same place before.

A wonderful edge-of-the-seat thriller that mixes just the right amount of suspense and paranoia to keep you hooked.  Lucy and Marco have great chemistry (even though the novel never slows down enough to give them space for romance) and a series of creepy antagonists keep readers on their toes.  Things get a bit strained towards the end as Stokes tries to wrap everything up and some of the explanations didn't make much sense, but the adventure is so much fun along the way that you want to just let it go so you can enjoy the ride.  Great read!

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