Keep in mind My Title: Pedal-to-the-metal thrill when the spouse exposes extra than simply her husband’s infidelity
On the surface, 36-year-old Cressida Maria Howard leads a truly enviable life. She is a successful businesswoman who runs speech therapy clinics and is married to multimillionaire hotelier and tech entrepreneur Laurence Howard. They have a 17 year old daughter and live in a fabulous modern seaside villa in Dalkey, one of Dublin’s most exclusive suburbs. But not everything in her garden is rosy behind the glittering facade.
An overheard telephone conversation between Laurence and a new employee, the beautiful South American computer expert Nina, leads her to suspect that her husband is having an affair – and not for the first time. He often works long hours and prefers to stay at his flagship hotel, the 1796, rather than driving home to Dalkey. Cressida believes Kate Spicer, who runs the spas at the Howard hotel chain’s hotels in Ireland and London, could be another object of Laurence’s affection.
Kate was close to Laurence’s late twin brother Pearse, the man who invented and developed her high-tech company, Ferryman. Another problem that just came up is that her bright and popular teenage daughter Emily-Jane has fallen out with her father in a rather spectacular way. The two hardly agree on his decision to merge Ferryman with an American cell phone giant called SpeakEasy.
Neither the company nor its CEO Dirk Ackroyd have a good ethical reputation and the UK government has refused a license. Emily-Jane, a kind of tech Greta Thunberg, is furious with her greedy father for compromising Ferryman’s excellent reputation for short-term gains – he received a backed payment of $ 10 million from Ackroyd Offshore tax free Caribbean account offered when the deal goes through. The merger would allow SpeakEasy and Ackroyd to gain a degree of seriousness and access to European markets. Cressida decides enough is enough and eventually agrees to divorce Laurence. She reluctantly seeks help from a young geek, freelance programmer, and MSc student named Brioni O’Brien, who is supposed to help her gather evidence of Laurence’s infidelity and shameful business.
Fascinated by the powerful tech players, Brioni installs a computer worm in Laurence’s laptop with her shaved head, pink mohawk and ultra-modern tech setup and infiltrates his company’s computers with it.
In the hands of a less talented writer, this could have been the equivalent of an average thriller. Fortunately, Sam Blake does a great job of stepping up the tension, delivering one of her signature killer twists in a book that has more hairpin turns and twists than San Francisco’s famous Lombard Street.
Blake is the pseudonym of the literary scout and popular fiction guru Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, who comes from St. Albans in Hertfordshire, but has lived in Co Wicklow longer than ever in England since she met and married an Irish Garda. She was a kind of literary poacher and gamekeeper who had advocated aspiring writers for years. She began her own literary career six years ago when her husband set out on an eight-week transatlantic sailing trip.
In Remember My Name, she switches seamlessly through the aisles. What could have been a straightforward romantic story of infidelity and retribution turns into a tough, full-throttle crime thriller. The change of direction in the plot is wonderfully handled, and while mystery and chaos envelop the main actors, it becomes clear that virtually all of them have dark secrets to hide.
Thriller: Remember My Name by Sam Blake
Corvus, 400 pages, hardcover € 14.99; E-book € 2.99
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Remember my name from Sam Blake
Remember my name from Sam Blake
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