‘Amnesia by Michael Ridpath

Published by Corvus,
20 May 2017.
ISBN: 978-1-7823975-6-4

It’s March 1999 in St Andrews in Scotland when Clémence having dropped her boyfriend off for a bus to Glasgow, receives a call from her aunt Madeleine currently in New York. “Oh! Clémence, darling I need to ask you a very great favour” she said. An old friend of mine and your grandparents, Alistair Cunningham, has had an accident, he fell down the stairs and hit his head and it appears that he has lost most of his memory. Could you collect him from Inverness hospital and take care of him until I can get there? As Aunt Madeleine had paid for Clémence to go to boarding school and was now currently paying her university fees at St Andrews, Clémence agrees.

The hospital informs Clémence that although Alistair was unconscious for several hours, he is basically for 83, a fit man. He does not have Alzheimer but retrograde amnesia and that being at home maybe around familiar items and photographs could jog his memory. Which is where she could be of great help. And so, with apprehension at the task before her Clémence and the old man set out for his remote cottage by Loch Glass.

Encouraging the silent man beside her to speak Clémence asks what he can remember. With frustration burning in his voice the old man says according to the nurse the only contact they could locate was Madeleine Giannelli who gave the nurse some basic information. That he was born in 1916, went to school in Yorkshire, then Oxford university, that he had been a GP and then emigrated to Australia.  He has no idea why he came to Scotland and rented a cottage and says he’s not sure he wants to remember his old life!

Despite her initial apprehension Clémence, finds the cottage lovely and begins to look forward to helping the old man regain his memory. The chance finding of a manuscript by Alistair Cunningham, dated May 1973 which reads like a memoir, and opens with a murder in Wyvis, where they are now residing, of someone known to Clémence has her thinking. Could this old man be a killer? Clémence determines to discover if the killer is the old man and that is the reason, he is reluctant to remember his old life.

The manuscript it takes us back to occurrences in France in 1935, introducing many well-drawn characters that appear throughout the life of Alistair Cunningham, both in Antibes June 1939, and Naples June 1947.

Michael Ridpath, that master storyteller had me totally gripped as I eagerly turned each page trying to solve the mystery.  Ingeniously plotted with an unexpected twist at the end, I heartily recommend this book as ‘not to be missed’.
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Reviewer: Lizzie Sirett

Michael Ridpath was born in Devon in 1961 but brought up in Yorkshire. He was educated at Millfield, Merton College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, Michael Ridpath used to work in the City of London as a bond trader.  He has written eight thrillers set in the worlds of business and finance but is now trying his hand at something slightly different.  Where The Shadows Lie, the first in the Fire and Ice series featuring an Icelandic detective named Magnus Jonson, was published in 2010.  He has published three further books in the series.  He now lives in North London.

 http://michaelridpath.com/