Everything She Forgot

August 31, 2015
When school teacher Margaret Holloway, the heroine of this absorbing psychological thriller from Edgar-finalist Ballantyne (The Guilty One), gets caught in a horrific traffic accident on a London motorway during a blizzard in December 2013, a mysterious disfigured man rescues her from her car. Increasingly obsessed about a dark time in her childhood that she seems to have blocked out, Margaret soon discovers that the man who rescued her is now in a coma, and her growing unease is beginning to affect her family and her teaching career. In flashbacks to 1985, the youngest son of a murderous crime family desperately attempts to reconnect with his seven-year-old daughter as he seeks a new, more honest life, while a small-time journalist sinks his teeth into the disappearance of a child. Ballantyne weaves a fine tale of family drama, dark secrets, and the past’s effect on the present. The threads seamlessly come together in a heart-wrenching, yet hopeful, finale. Agent: Nicola Barr, Greene & Heaton (U.K.).

August 1, 2015
Ballantyne combines a stolen child, lost memories, and a love gone wrong in her latest tale. Margaret Holloway, a happily married mother of two, is driving home on icy, snowy roads from work at Byron Academy, where she's a deputy head teacher, when she becomes involved in a multicar accident. Margaret has already had a bad day, so the collision is the last thing she needs. And this is no ordinary wreck: Margaret finds herself stuck in her car, and when it catches on fire, she realizes she's destined to die. Instead, a mysteriously deformed man breaks her window and pulls her out, putting his own life at risk in the process. After the car explodes, the man disappears, but Margaret soon tracks him down to the hospital where he's been taken and put into an induced coma. When she visits him, she learns his name is Maxwell Brown and that he's had no other visitors. Told from numerous points of view, the story flashes back to the events of 1985, when a little girl named Molly is abducted on her way to school. As her mother, Kathleen, and the whole country search for the child while fearing the worst, Molly is getting to know the man who took her-Big George McLaughlin, a gentle giant born into an unspeakably cruel family of gangsters. Meanwhile, an ambitious and unethical reporter named Angus Campbell is on Molly's trail, determined to use her case to make a name for himself. Readers will have no trouble figuring things out for themselves, but this is less a story of suspense and more one of Margaret's and George's personal journeys. Ballantyne has tightened and improved her writing since her first novel, and the effort shows. A sweet novel of love, redemption, and loss that chronicles one family's struggle with a difficult past.

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October 1, 2015
Leaving work late on a snowy December evening, Margaret Holloway is involved in what's called the worst multicar crash in London history. Trapped in her vehicle, she's saved by a stranger who breaks her window and hauls her out just before the car explodes; yet the shock of the accident lingers and reawakens old memories. In another plot thread set 28 years earlier, Big George McLaughlin, the baby in a notorious crime family headed by his ruthless father, seeks to reunite his former girlfriend (now married) and his seven-year-old daughter, Molly, but plans go awry, and he ends up snatching the child and causing a major incident. Angus Campbell, whose Christianity is so rigid as to be cruel, is a local journalist covering the story of the missing child, and his instincts are more acute than those of the police. Ballantyne (The Guilty One, 2013) ties the three strands together in the final pages in a manner that brings the most peace possible to those involved. A moving and sensitive mystery about childhood trauma and its resolution.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)