“He always comes at night, she’d said.”
Is “he” a ghost, a memory, or something more real? That’s the crux of Kat Rosenfield’s new mystery thriller, “You Must Remember This,” where the present intertwines with the past, and the dangers of living there are made manifest.
It’s Christmas Eve 2014, but elderly Miriam Caravasio has only an intermittent sense of where she is in time. Stirred awake, sensing her husband’s presence in the dark, Miriam walks out of the Whispers, her seaside estate in Maine, and onto the ice with her husband Theo, crossing the frozen reach to their romantic island hideaway. It’s their tradition, their secret. But Theo is long dead, isn’t he?
Looking back, Miriam sees a light shining from a window on the top floor and feels a “creeping sensation of dread” that spreads to the reader and never dissipates. “You Must Remember This” is permeated by a sense of unease, a not-quite-rightness goosed along by shiver-inducing sentences: “In the great stone house standing high on the hill, the light behind the upstairs window goes out.”
The novel’s epigraph features Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” and each of those forces play a significant part in this immersive story of a manor house and family, both stuffed with secrets. Advertising the novel as “a Knives Out-style whodunnit” certainly sets up high expectations, although the two stories don’t have much in common in tone or content besides their Northeast settings.
“You Must Remember This” is split into two timelines: The
