I have become a fan of Stacey Willingham and this new book kept my interest, but I will say some moves are starting to look familiar. In “A Flicker in the Dark,” a great debut novel, the female protagonist is examining a heinous crime committed 20 years earlier, for which her father was convicted. In “All the Dangerous Things” the female protagonist has had her toddler abducted and her sister has disappeared, perhaps wandered off into a swamp, never to be seen again.
“Forget Me Not” is again mainly set on the South Carolina coast, but begins in New York City. Claire Campbell’s journalism career, after ten years of real effort at a mid-rank rag, the fictional “New York Journal,” has stalled and freelance work is not going well. So, when her divorced father urges her to visit her mother in tiny Claxton, a village on the South Carolina coast, she is receptive to this idea and goes, even though her mother has become an irritating and unpleasant person.
Claire, we soon learn, is obsessed with the disappearance of her sister, 18-year-old Natalie, 22 years earlier. She broods on Natalie constantly and even has little hallucinations, seeing Natalie in the mirror. Although Natalie’s body was never found, a local boy, Jeffrey Salter, was convicted on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to life without parole.
The visit to mom fails quickly and, at loose ends, Claire impulsively takes a job picking grapes at remote, isolated Galloway Farm. No one goes there. Mitchell, the owner/ manager of Galloway Farm, is a kind of genius with plants, a guru of organic farming but also a scary, mesmerizing character who, in his ability to control others, reminded me of the character Lucy in Willingham’s “Only if You’re Lucky,” and in real life, Charles Manson.
Claire soon finds an old diary, written by woman named Marcia in 1983, about 22 years earlier. Needless to say, connections are made, tentative at first, between the present “family” at Galloway Farm and the distant past. There are hints, coincidences, some predictable, and some, I must concede, really clever moves the reader never saw coming.
“Forget Me Not” is a little saggy in the middle but closes hard and fast, secrets of the past emerging violently. A device used extensively here, as in a lot of new thrillers, is the cell phone. Claire tries to stay in touch with her father and a friend, Ryan, in New York, but, in this remote place, she only has one bar.
She is constantly aware of battery percentage and, in some really tense scenes, following clues at night in the woods and in old outbuildings, we are told every few minutes of how many percent are left on her battery, as if she were a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story, exploring a dark and dangerous cave with the flickering stub of her last candle.
