Book Review: Stay Awake by Megan Goldin

My Rating:

3.5⭐

Liv Reese wakes up in the backseat of a cab in New York with no recollection of how she got there. On returning home she sees two strangers living in her home, no signs of her belongings, her cat or any sign of her having lived there. She is unable to reach her best friend Amy, with whom she had shared the apartment or her boyfriend Marco. She seems to have lost her purse, phone and wallet. All she is carrying is a wad of cash and a bloodied knife wrapped in a t-shirt. She has little messages “Stay Awake”,”Don’t Sleep”,“Don’t Trust Anyone” scrawled across her hands and arms with a ballpoint pen. The last thing Liv remembers is answering her desk phone at work on a summer day a little over two years ago. She remembers nothing of her life between then and the moment she woke up in the cab.

On the same night Detectives Darcy Halliday and Jack Lavalle are called in to investigate the homicide of an unidentified man in an apartment building in New York. The victim was stabbed and the murder weapon is missing. The words "Wake Up" have been written in blood on the window of the apartment. Upon further investigation, video surveillance reveals a woman exiting the apartment on the night of the murder but given the angle, facial recognition is almost impossible. Liv realizes that she may be connected to the murder but has a hard time figuring out how, as she forgets all preceding events of the day once she falls asleep and her memories reset at the same point over two years ago (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?). She is distrustful of the police and does her best to avoid and evade while trying to piece together her missing memories. What happened two years ago? Who is the dead guy in the apartment? Is Liv a suspect, a victim or both?

The narrative is split between two timelines- one in the present day and the other depicting events from Liv’s life two years ago. Liv’s past is shared in her own voice and the current timeline is shared by Liv in the first person with Darcy Halliday’s perspective shared in the third person. True to its name, this book did keep me awake till the very last page. I enjoyed how the timelines merge and that the pace does not falter throughout the narrative. Though the dissociative memory loss angle and the constant resetting of Liv’s memory do lead to repetition of content, the author manages to keep the narrative taut and the suspense palpable till the very end. The final reveal is not entirely unpredictable, but I did enjoy the build-up towards the climax with its twists and turns and multiple red herrings. At times the writing did feel a bit choppy but I felt that it added to the atmosphere of the novel rather than detract from it. Having said that, the finale felt a bit rushed and I wasn’t completely satisfied with how the story is wrapped up after the big reveal and though the motivation behind the crime is not unclear a little more analysis and explanation would have been great. I don’t know whether this was deliberate so as to leave readers pondering over the story trying to fill in the gaps on their own or if parts were edited out of the narrative to keep it compact. Overall, this was an engaging read and I did like how both Liv’s and Darcy’s characters were portrayed. This is my first Megan Goldin novel and I’m surely going to read more of her work in the future.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.