You Must Remember This

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.