A Book A Week

Claire hasn’t exactly been avoiding home, but she hasn’t made any effort to return either. For years, work gave her an excuse, but now she’s jobless, nearly broke, and running out of reasons. The truth is harder to face. Her sister Natalie vanished twenty-two years ago, just days after her eighteenth birthday. A man was arrested, blood was found in a car, and the case was declared closed. But Claire’s family never really moved on.

When a call from her father brings news of her mother’s injury, Claire finally comes back. Yet the house is suffocating, heavy with memories she can’t bear. With nothing to keep her in the city and nowhere else to go, she takes a summer job at Galloway Farms, a muscadine vineyard on the South Carolina coast, the very place Natalie spent her last summer alive.

What begins as a way to escape soon turns darker. Hidden among the vineyard’s belongings, Claire discovers an old diary. At first, it reads like a story of youthful rebellion. But as its secrets unravel, Claire is drawn into something far more sinister. And she can’t shake the feeling that Natalie’s disappearance may be tied to it all.

I first encountered Stacy Willingham’s writing with her debut, A Flicker in the Dark, and I was immediately drawn to the way she weaves psychological suspense with deeply developed characters. Her prose breathed fresh life into the Southern gothic thriller genre, a strength she carried into her follow-up novels as well. So when her publishers offered me a copy of Forget Me Not, I had to resist the urge to abandon my towering TBR pile and dive right in.

Forget Me Not has everything I’ve come to expect from a Willingham novel: a protagonist haunted by past trauma, a mystery that unfolds with expert pacing, and plenty of twists designed to keep readers off balance until the final reveal. Willingham takes her time letting the story simmer, building atmosphere and dread with each new revelation. I experienced most of the book through the audiobook, and Karissa Vacker’s narration gave the story a grounded, realistic weight that pulled me in even further.

My only minor complaint lies with the diary sections, which were written in third person. I’m not sure why that choice was made, but it occasionally pulled me out of the otherwise immersive flow. Still, buoyed by the atmospheric Southern vineyard setting, a troubled yet compelling main character, and a mystery that ties everything together, Forget Me Not proves once again why Willingham is one of today’s most exciting voices in suspense fiction.

For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads. 

(2025, 67)