Matthew Blake
July 2025
9780063433465 (ISBN10: 006343346X)
About
An expert in memory must uncover the truth about her family’s wartime past in this dazzling psychological thriller from the #1 international bestselling author of Anna O.
Olivia Finn is a memory expert at Charing Cross Hospital in London. One night, she receives an urgent call from the police at the Hotel Lutetia on Paris’s famous Left Bank. Olivia’s French grandmother, Josephine Benoit, has appeared at the Lutetia in a distressed state claiming she once committed a murder in the hotel at the end of the Second World War.
Traveling to Paris, Olivia finds her grandmother confused. But Josephine insists it is a recovered memory from the past. More disturbingly, hotel records show that a woman did die in that room of the Lutetia in 1945. Could her story really be true?
As people start dying in the present day, Olivia is plunged into a race against time to uncover the truth about Josephine and what really happened all those years ago. Set among the glamorous streets of Paris, this addictive thriller what if a memory could get you killed?
My Review
Thank you to Netgalley for allowing me a copy. I loved Anna O and recommended it highly for months to friends so I was really pleased to get an advance copy of Mathew Blakes latest book.
Centred about the identify of Dr Olivia Finn’s gran Josephine Benoit this story weaves through the past from 1945 to present day. Based in Paris some of the French vocabulary was difficult to understand, I was very probably pronouncing them wrong in my head. It swings from era to era but melts together beautifully. Dr Finn is a psychotherapist a memory expert, helping people to overcome trauma from buried memories. Over time memories take on a life of their own and the original memory becomes obscured and different, this becomes apparent in this storyline. Matthew Blake delves deep into the effects of memories in this novel. Alongside her mentor and friend Louis Dr Finn is taken on a confusing journey of love, betrayal and false memories that even she was not aware she had been controlled into believing
The ending I felt was almost predictable.
It didn’t grip me like Anna O did and I found it hard to stay with a times.
Without our memories who are we.
