28 May 2021

Review: HAVE YOU SEEN ME? Kate White

  • this edition published by Harper Collins 2020
  • ISBN 978-0-00-842723-8
  • 366 pages
  • author website

Synopsis (author)

The key to her missing memories could bring relief—
or unlock her worst nightmares.

On a cold, rainy morning, finance journalist Ally Linden arrives soaked to the bone at her Manhattan office, only to find that she’s forgotten her keycard. When her boss shows, he’s shocked to see her—because, he explains, she hasn’t worked there in five years.

Ally knows her name, but is having trouble coming up with much beyond that, though after a trip to the psychiatric ER, she begins to piece together important facts: she lives on the Upper West Side; she’s now a freelance journalist; she’s married to a terrific man named Hugh. More memories materialize and yet she still can’t recall anything about the previous two days. Diagnosed as having experienced a “dissociative state,” she starts to wonder if it may have been triggered by something she saw—an accident, or worse, a trauma from her childhood that has risen to the surface.

Desperate for answers, Ally tries to track where she spent the missing days, but every detail she unearths points to an explanation that’s increasingly ominous, and it’s clear someone wants to prevent her from learning where those forty-eight hours went. In order to uncover the truth, Ally must dig deep into the secrets of her past—and outsmart the person who seems determined to silence her.

My take

When Ally Linden arrives at work, she doesn't realise she has been missing for two days. Her husband hasn't realised she is missing because when he last saw her she was storming out after an argument. 

Bits of her memory return but she still doesn't have answers to her fugue state, and it seems that something deep in her past may have triggered everything. A friend suggests that she may have had a shock, and Ally is inclined to believe that after she finds blood-soaked tissues in her coat pocket.

A book that kept me engaged right to the end.

My rating: 4.5

About the author 

Kate White is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen novels of suspense: seven standalone psychological thrillers, including Have You Seen Me? (an Amazon Editors’ mystery and thriller pick for 2020), as well as eight Bailey Weggins mysteries.

Her next suspense novel, The Fiancée, will be published on June 29, 2021.

For fourteen years Kate served as the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, and though she loved the job (and all the freebies to be found in the Cosmo beauty closet), she decided to leave eight years ago to concentrate full-time on being a suspense author.

Her first mystery, Even If It Kills Her, was a Kelly Ripa Book Club pick and #1 bestseller on Amazon. She has been published in countries around the world. Her most recent Bailey Weggins mystery, Such a Perfect Wife, was nominated for an International Thriller Writers Award.

Like many female mystery writers, Kate fell in love with the genre after reading her first Nancy Drew book, The Secret of Redgate Farm.

Kate is a frequent speaker at libraries and conferences and loves to share her journey from magazine editor to suspense novelist in a talk called “On Becoming an Author: Forging a New Creative Path and Finding Winning Ideas All Around You.”

She is also the editor of the Mystery Writers of America Cookbook, a collection of recipes from the field’s top-selling authors. In addition to writing mysteries and thrillers, Kate is the author of several bestselling career books, including The Gutsy Girl Handbook: Your Manifesto for Success, as well as I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: How to Ask for the Money, Snag the Promotion, and Create the Career You Deserve, and Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do.

She divides her time now between New York City and Las Flores, Uruguay.

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