- The Memory Game
"The Memory Game" is a
psychological thriller byLondon journalists, Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, under thepseudonym Nicci French . It was their first novel (followed by "The Safe House ") and originally published byWilliam Heinemann in1997 .Plot
The novel concerns the account of one Jane Martello, a
middle aged woman undergoingdivorce proceedings with her husband, and subsequently separating herself from a large and strong family she has know since her childhood. The intricate traditions of her family and the one she had married into begin to break down when the body of hersister-in-law , Natalie, is found buried in the garden, after over two decades. This startlingly close distance to the house leads to the revelation of the murderer being very close to the family after all. The revelation acts to bring down the family structure that for so long was unbalanced, but stable - such as Jane's father-in-law, Alan, an openlycrude andsexist novellist having once frequently had relations outside his marriage (to the knowledge of the whole family) and other underlying tensions between family members.Jane undergoes
psychiatric counselling , as she revels in the mysterious circumstances of one of her best childhood friend's death, and already present forerunnings to what appear to be amid-life crisis . She undergoes a memory exercise (that the book is named for) to unlock memories lost from the trauma of her friend's death. What she unlocks proves seemingly to be the key to the death of Natalie, but the validity of the memories become questionable with the serious allegations they lead to.
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