Eight thrillers featuring characters with memory issues

Bradeigh Godfrey is a physician, mom of four, and a writer. Her medical career is focused on caring for veterans with visible and invisible disabilities, and she is passionate about improving quality of life and wellness in veterans through research, teaching, and clinical work.

Her debut novel, Imposter, is a psychological thriller exploring sisterhood, secrets, and the neuroscience of memory and trauma.

At CrimeReads Godfrey tagged eight favorite psychological thrillers, including:

All is not Forgotten by Wendy Walker

In one of my favorite psychological thrillers, a young woman who suffered a brutal sexual assault is given an experimental drug to erase the memories of the event. But in the following weeks, even though she has no conscious memory of the attack, she is left with physical and emotional scars that will not allow her to forget.

Could this really happen? To my knowledge, no drug can erase specific memories, however, the body and the emotional centers of the brain can hold trauma that the person doesn’t consciously remember. So yes, the general concept makes good medical sense, and is the setup for an emotionally resonant and heartbreaking story.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Q&A with Wendy Walker.

--Marshal Zeringue