‘You Must Remember This’ Is A Mystery Novel You Won’t Forget

“He always comes at night, she’d said.”

Is “he” Are you looking for a ghost? A memory? Or something more concrete? That’s the crux of Kat Rosenfield’s new mystery thriller, “You Must Remember This,” The dangers of living in this area where the past and the present intersect are revealed.

It’s Christmas Eve 2014, but elderly Miriam Caravasio has only an intermittent sense of where she is in time. Stirred awake, sensing her husband’s presence in the dark, Miriam walks out of the Whispers, her seaside estate in Maine, and onto the ice with her husband Theo, crossing the frozen reach to their romantic island hideaway. It’s their tradition, their secret. But Theo is long dead, isn’t he?

Miriam, looking back, sees a light coming from the top floor window and feels at ease. “creeping sensation of dread” It spreads to the reader, and it never goes away. “You Must Remember This” it is infused with a feeling of unease, a not quite-rightness that is aided by shiver inducing sentences. “In the great stone house standing high on the hill, the light behind the upstairs window goes out.”

The novel’s epigraph features Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” Each one of those forces plays an important part in this story about a manor family and a family, both full of secrets. The novel can be advertised as “a Knives Out-style whodunnit” certainly sets up high expectations, although the two stories don’t have much in common in tone or content besides their Northeast settings.

“You Must Remember This” is split into two timelines: The modern-day portion, with the family gathered for Christmas 2014, is told from the perspective of Miriam’s granddaughter, 26-year-old Delphine (“Del”); the other portion features snapshots of Miriam’s past life, from headstrong little girl to headstrong woman, including revelations about her life with the lobsterman Theo, “the boy on the bow of the boat” As a child, she saw the shore from shore once.

In 2014, Mimi’s husband had been gone half a century, killed in a boating accident, a circumstance Del considers a “most gorgeous, tragic love story,” although the real story of the marriage turns out not to be the romantic tragedy of Del’s imaginings. Mimi talks in unsettling terms about her late husband, as if he’d just stepped out of the room. Del thinks that she sees an old-fashioned man at the end of a dark hallway. And if it is all in Mimi’s imagination, what to make of the tell-tale bruise on her neck?

The Whispers, so named because of their fractured family, has been able to celebrate Christmas with the members of the broken family. “when the wind hits the gables just right, it sounds like someone muttering.” Miriam (“Mimi”) is 85, suffering memory loss, and lives in a facility on the mainland, where she’s faithfully visited by Del and cared for by Adam, who is escorting Miriam to the Whispers for what may be her last Christmas.

Del is an unhappy, indecisive woman. After escaping New, she has a 3 % phone battery with no messages and is at loose ends.