You Must Remember This: A Novel

A Knives Out-style whodunnit with a twist of Taylor Jenkins Reid, You Must Remember This is an immersive Gothic mystery, with a long-ago love affair, icy death, and a rich family gone bad, from Kat Rosenfield, the acclaimed author of No One Will Miss Her. On Christmas Eve, eighty-five-year-old Miriam Caravasios steps onto the ice that surrounds her seaside estate on Maine´s Mount Desert Island. As a younger woman, she used to steal out on winter nights to meet her lover, walking across the frozen reach to their secret meeting place. She knows the way--but not the year. Miriam, her mind clouded by dementia, doesn´t hear the snap of thin ice until it´s too late. Was it an accident? Suicide? Or worse: did someone lure the old woman onto the frozen reach, to her death? There are plenty of suspects; Miriam´s fractured and complicated family has gathered in their Bar Harbor mansion to celebrate what everyone believed would likely be the matriarch´s last Christmas. The guests include Delphine, Miriam´s granddaughter, a frightened and insecure young woman who adored her grandmother, and Miriam´s live-in aide, Adam, whom Delphine has been secretly dating. There is Miriam´s former housekeeper, Shelly Dyer, who left the family´s employment years ago under mysterious circumstances. There are Miriam´s children: Theodora, who gave up everything to assume the role of caretaker; Diana, who seems just a little too eager to inherit her share of the estate; and Richard, whose longtime grudge against his mother has curdled into gleeful contempt at her deterioration. But it´s Delphine who comes in for the greatest scrutiny when they learn the shocking news that Miriam´s will cut off her children, leaving her granddaughter almost everything. As tensions rise, Delphine is emboldened to start asking questions: not just about her grandmother´s death, but about her life, and the love story that defined it as the rest of her memories faded. The trail will take her into the past, into dark places -- and eventually, onto thin ice.