All you took from me by Lisa Kenway

When Dr Clare Carpenter wakes up from a coma in hospital where she works, she can’t remember what happened, but she can sense the menace of a big man with a backpack in the corridor approaching her room. She manages to alert the staff but the man is gone and they don’t believe her. It seems she has been in a serious car accident a month ago that killed her husband, Ray, and that she has a brain injury resulting in retrograde amnesia. When two detectives come to interview her about the single vehicle crash in the Blue Mountains, they question her about why her husband was wearing chain mail at the time of the crash and about his membership of the Megin Medieval Fight Club. Unable to help them, due to her memory loss, Clare is nevertheless sure there is something they are not telling her. She needs to find out what really happened and why there is someone after her. Isolated from her Jehovah’s Witness family and with few friends, Clare is determined to get back to her work as an anesthetist and to do this she must convince a psychologist that she is fit to practice. She must also deal with the mounting threats from someone about something she can’t remember. When hypnotism starts to reveal some uncomfortable memories, Clare decides on a course of action using anasthetic drugs to access her memories and then to track down those who can confirm what happened. The author is a writer and anesthetist and uses her professional knowledge to lend authenticity to the experiments the main character does to retrieve her memories. What I found truly terrifying in this thriller was that the protagonist was able to experiment on patients undergoing surgery under her care and that a staff member with mental health issues could still have free access to drugs and threaten staff at her workplace. It is hard to like such a reckless and self-centered character and ultimately I didn’t care who did what and why.

Themes: Psychological thriller, Memory.

Sue Speck