Product Description

You remember an idyllic childhood. But your memory is deceitful. And possibly deadly... When a skeleton is unearthed in the Martellos' garden, Jane Martello is shocked to learn it's that of her childhood friend, Natalie, who went missing twenty-five years ago. Encouraged by a therapist to recover lost memories, Jane hopes to find out what really took place when she was a child - and what happened to Natalie. But in learning the truth about hers and Natalie's past, is Jane putting her own future at terrible risk?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86119 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author
Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. The couple are married and live in Suffolk. There are ten other novels by Nicci French, most recently Secret Smile, Catch Me When I Fall, Losing You and Until It's Over (hardback).

Customer Reviews

Compelling, but characters are a let down
The Memory Game is a startling and incredibly well written novel. The characters are described with great clarity and are unique and the plot is clever with several deft twists. The quality of writing is impeccable, and everything is explained in a beautiful, lyrical style. Why, then, only Three Stars?

The characters may be original and three-dimensional but most are unlikeable. The very British word 'pompous' describes them all perfectly. I almost stopped reading halfway through because the characters were all so self-absorbed and stereotypically 'upper class' in an irritatingly bohemian way. The past and present actions of all the characters were made up of a mass of illicit affairs, broken marriages, secrets, lies and arguments. The one act that really underlined to me why I disliked them all so much was when Jane's brother decided to make a documentary about them all and despite initial protests they all took part in it - it was such a cold blooded thing to do and seemed so pretentious. The complex web of infidelities also wore thin, it got to a stage where there were so many affairs between different members of the same family that it was difficult to recall them all.

To some extent, I came to sympathize with the narrator, Jane, although I thought she was insufferable a lot of the time. The book was written in a first person narrative but I could not relate to nearly all of her life experiences. Even her love interest, Casper, managed to irritate me. Why the hell would any sane person want to name their daughter Fanny, which refers to a woman's genitals in Britain?

Overall The Memory Game is a competent thriller with a shocking, albeit thoroughly depressing, ending. The one thing that really shone out at me was Nicci French's writing style which was faultless. Often a new paragraph would start with a surprising opening line that would draw me in and keep me hooked.

JoAnne

Caught me by surprise!
With "Beneath the Skin" I knew who the killer was with the first murder, and therefore told myself smugly that I knew who the killer was in this one, too. The narrator talks too much about smoking and not eating when I wanted her to get on with the plot, but I was rewarded in the end with a real twist! No matter how much Jane talked about cooking, smoking, drinking, eating,not eating, and what she was wearing, something in the narration drove me on, and so the writers were obviously doing something right. Believe me, at times this thriller might seem not worth the trouble, but it is, and in retrospect I realize that the writers knew exactly what they were doing all along.

A bit of a let down
Having just devoured 'Beneath the skin' by the same author which is absolutely brilliant I was really looking forward to losing myself in this book. I couldn't really do that- I couldn't really get into these characters at all, couldn't get into what should have been the emotions of the book. For instance when someone's daughter has been missing for 25 years and suddenly a body is found in the family's garden you would expect devastation but all the characters didn't seem to show the highly charged emotion I expected it all seemed very shallow. I really like to LIVE a book whilst I am reading it but this one just had me feeling like I was skimming the surface somehow. It's a shame because 'beneath the skin' is really mindblowing. I've just started 'killing me softly' and that also seems as though it is going to be a real treat. With 'the memory game' I just couldn't get the interest going really and sometimes it was a chore to pick it up.