FORGET-ME-NOT

This second entry in Carlisle’s “What Happened to Mia Davis?” series delves further into the details of an ongoing murder mystery.

The author’s follow-up to her series debut, Reasonable (2023), backtracks to years before Elaine Reid’s death in North Carolina in 2023, and her former best friend Cat Clark’s arrest and indictment for the crime. Effectively narrating from the three first-person perspectives of central characters Elaine, Cat, and police detective Rachel McGowen, the book fills in the details of Elaine’s murder, beginning by highlighting the victim, the killer, and the former best friend caught in the middle. As Elaine’s body floats above the carnage, she becomes a spectral spirit who must now attempt to resolve the crime from beyond. The novel sketches in Elaine’s history in 2007 and 2008, during her Green Valley University collegiate days, when she dated moody boyfriend Evan Summers. When she met his caustic family, they were a shocking contrast to her own affluent upbringing. For his 20th birthday in 2007, she got him a fake ID, using the name and face of someone from a 1950s class yearbook. Other chapters detail Elaine’s formerly close friendship with Cat and the latter’s struggle with alcoholism. Readers also learn about how her classmate Mia Davis and then-frat boy Tim Clark came into the picture, with the latter eventually becoming Cat’s husband. As Carlisle weaves more strands into the plot’s tangled tapestry, readers may have trouble keeping track of them all. Although the book’s pacing is snappy throughout, the timeline jumps between the present and past frenetically—moving from the misinterpreted crime scene, where ghostly, invisible Elaine works to communicate with Cat, to Elaine and Cat’s earlier assessments of love’s jealousies and pains. Finally, the story dives into Green Valley detective McGowen’s diligent, superlative policework, which unearths a string of other deaths. Carlisle fits all the puzzle pieces together with a deft hand yet still makes room for a thrilling cliffhanger, which leads into the trilogy’s planned final installment.

A complex series continuation that’s challenging but often gripping.