Book Review: Forget Me Not by Stacy Willingham

3.5⭐
Genre ~ mystery fiction
Setting ~ South Carolina
Publication date ~ August 26, 2025
Publisher ~ Macmillan Audio
Est Page Count ~ 336 (p+ 52 chapters +e)
Audio length ~ 9 hours 26 minutes
Narrators ~ Helen Laser, Karissa Vacker
POV ~ single 1st & single 3rd
Featuring ~ past secrets, slow burn

My review:

Claire is reluctantly heading back home to help her mother after a fall. Home is a place she hasn’t been interested in visiting since her sister, Natalie, went missing 22 years ago. Mom isn’t too keen on having help, so Claire soon hits the road, but not back to NYC…to the place her sister used to visit right before she disappeared.

Claire gets hired for the summer by Mitchell and stays on the property, Galloway Farm, a vineyard. Also, living nearby are Marcia, Mitchell’s wife, and Liam, their son. She locates a diary in her cabin written back in the 80’s. She shouldn’t read it, she really shouldn’t, but her nosiness gets the best of her and she devours the pages any chance she can get…as would I. Could there be any information in there that might give some answers about Natalie?

About the diary ~ we had a different narrator for those chapters, yay!, but it’s told in the 3rd, which I found a little bit odd. I never had a diary, but if I were to write in one I assume I’d be writing it in the 1st, no?

There were some draggy bits, but overall it was fine. The vineyard gave off a creepy vibe, which I liked. Some obviousness and a couple zingers kept me listening. Can’t say my pulse was pounding really at any point, but Karissa has a way with her tones that makes me feel like it should be!

Narration notes:
Absolutely no complaints.

Add to your never ending TBR  ~ goodreads

I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve read it.

Book blurb:

A pulse-pounding new Southern thriller from the author of the runaway bestseller A Flicker in the Dark.

Twenty-two years ago, Claire Campbell’s older sister, Natalie, disappeared shortly after her eighteenth birthday. Days later, her blood was found in a car, a man was arrested, and the case was swiftly closed. In the decades since, Claire has attempted to forget her traumatic past by moving to the city and climbing the ranks as an investigative journalist… until an unexpected call from her father forces her to come back home and face it all anew.

With the entire summer now looming ahead—a summer spent with nothing to do in her childhood home, with her estranged mother—Claire decides on a whim to accept a seasonal job at Galloway Farm, a muscadine vineyard in coastal South Carolina less than an hour away from where she grew up. At first glance, Galloway is an idyllic escape for Claire. A scenic retreat full of slow-paced nostalgia, as well as a place where her sister seemed truly happy in that last summer before she vanished, it feels like the perfect plan to pass the time. However, as soon as Claire starts to settle in, she stumbles across an old diary written by one of the vineyard’s owners, and what at first seems like a story of young rebellion and love turns into something much more sinister as it begins to describe details of various unsolved crimes. As the days stretch on, Claire finds herself becoming more and more secluded as she starts to obsess over the diary’s contents… as well as the lingering feeling that her own sister’s disappearance may be somehow tied to it all.

Galloway was supposed to be a place to help her move forward, but instead, Claire quickly finds herself immersed in her own dark and dangerous past.

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