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    The Memory Collector: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Memory Collector: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Memory Collector: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Memory Collector: A Novel

    Written by Meg Gardiner

    Narrated by Susan Ericksen

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett's specialty is the psychological autopsy-an investigation into a person's life to determine whether a death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. She calls herself a deadshrinker instead of a headshrinker: The silence of her "patients" is a key part of the job's attraction. When Jo is asked to do a psychological autopsy on a living person-one with a suspect memory who can't be trusted to participate in his own medical care-she knows all her skills will be put to the test.

    Jo is called to the scene of an aircraft inbound from London to help deal with a passenger who is behaving erratically. She figures out that he's got anteretrograde amnesia, and can't form new memories. As his thoughts drift away like tendrils of smoke, Jo finds herself racing to save a patient who can walk and talk yet can't help her figure out just what happened to him. For every cryptic clue he is able to drag up from his memory, Jo has to sift through a dozen nonsensical statements. Suddenly a string of clues arises-something to do with a superdeadly biological agent code-named "Slick," missing people, and a secret partnership gone horribly wrong. Jo realizes her patient's addled mind may hold the key to preventing something terrible from happening in her beloved San Francisco. In order to prevent it, she will have to get deeper into the life of a patient than she ever has before, hoping the truth emerges from the fog of his mind in time to save her city-and herself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJun 11, 2009
    ISBN9781423361657
    Unavailable
    The Memory Collector: A Novel
    Author

    Meg Gardiner

    Meg Gardiner is the author of sixteen acclaimed, award-winning novels. Her thrillers have been bestsellers in the U.S. and internationally and have been translated into more than twenty languages. China Lake won an Edgar Award and UNSUB, the first in Gardiner’s acclaimed UNSUB series, won a Barry Award. Her third UNSUB novel, The Dark Corners of the Night, has been bought by Amazon Studios for development as a television series. A former lawyer, three-time Jeopardy! champion, and two-time president of Mystery Writers of America, Gardiner lives in Austin, Texas. 

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    Reviews for The Memory Collector

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Another really good work by Gardiner. The premise was quite scary in a how could that really happen sort of way, zipping along at a frantic pace. While the ending wasn't by any means a happy one, it was logical character-wise and I'll give extra credit for having the nerve to end it that way but totally illogical otherwise.
    • 4/5
      Starts off a little slow IMHO but then takes off to become a fast-paced read. The action and characters are believable although the plot is a little strange. The underyling premise seems to be what would you or could you do if you cannot recall anything past the last 5 minutes? Your past life is well remembered but everything after a certain point is life in 5-minute spurts that gets erased and then you start all over again. What would you or wouldn't you do to save your family? Well written and developed not to mention intriguing storylines. A great weekend read.
    • 3/5
      The Memory Collector by Meg Gardiner is based upon a fascinating premise - a substance is created with the accidental side effect that those exposed to it are unable to retain short term memories. Thus, they live in the moment, until they break concentration and then they are "reset" to before their memory was erased. The protagonist of the story is involved in a theft and has a reset state that involves murder. The author does a beautiful job of describing what it would be like to live in the moment, and to be constantly "reset." The protagonist continually has to re-establish what's happened and what he is doing and why. It is enthralling and kept me reading.The rest of the story however, seemed predictable and the characters never really seemed real to me. I never sympathized with any of the characters enough to care what happened to them, which was a real shame because the plot had a lot of promise. Not a bad book, an entertaining read but didn't live up to my expectations.
    • 3/5
      This book is a wild ride from South Africa to San Francisco. It's also about that much of a stretch to believe the concept. However, Gardiner succeeded in pulling me in, so much so that I read the final third of the book at top speed, in tense anticipation of the ending.Jo Beckett is an interesting character, but I found the other characters much more fascinating. The person who is contaminated with a chemical product that destroys short term memory, Ian Kanan, is very interesting. His memory loss means that he only remembers anything for five minutes. If you think about it; that would make for a very scary world. His wife and son are hostages and they are both very touching, very brave. Even the bad guys are interesting and more than just generic bad guys.I recommend this book for a nice summer read on the beach, but not perhaps for an evening home alone.
    • 4/5
      San Francisco forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett is asked to examine Ian Kanan, a distressed airline passenger, who turns out to be suffering from anterograde amnesia, which makes it impossible for him to form new memories. When Kanan escapes from the hospital before Beckett can learn more, Beckett, SFPD Lt. Amy Tang, and Gabe Quintana race to find Kanan before the people he's pursuing can unleash Slick, an experimental bioweapon, on the public. Second in a series featuring Jo Beckett, forensic pyschologist. Although sometimes a little improbable, this is a solid thriller and a fast read.
    • 5/5
      Jo Beckett is a forensic psychiatrist in San Francisco. Her particular skills are sought when the cause of death is uncertain. She sifts through the lives of the deceased in hopes of figuring out cause of death. In this book, she is brought in when a man who is still alive goes berserk on a flight from London. Not her usual patient, she just happened to be in the area of the airport when the flight lands and a call comes in for psychiatric help with the passenger. We learn that her patient, Ian Kanan, can't hold new memories in his head for longer than 5 minutes. Jo realizes very quickly that there is something dangerous and deadly about Ian, and she must race the clock to figure out what is going on before it's too late.Wonderful use of language; suspense in every chapter. Surprises and unexpected happenings throughout, Meg continues to deliver first rate stories.
    • 5/5
      very good; fast paced; loved all the San Francisco and Pennisula sites; Monkey neighbor is weird but funny.
    • 2/5
      When I first discovered Meg Gardiner, I rejoiced. But I have to say that I was pretty disappointed with this book. I really like Jo and Gabe, but this was just lacking something. She does do one interesting thing, creating a bad guy (Ian Kanan) that you feel a great deal of sympathy for. However, I think "Slick" was just a little too out-there, the nano-technology and its effects a little too complex to know if it’s something that’s plausible or not. I mean, it already erases your short-term memory, does it have to explode too? Plausibility is really a key component of a suspense novel for me – could this situation really happen? If the answer is "no", then where is the suspense? Also, it seemed like Gardiner relied on similes a little too much. If you search the book on Amazon for the word "like", you come up with 199 instances. I’m willing to bet that at least 75% of them are used in phrases like "like a lighthouse searchlight", "like bulbs in a tumble dryer", and "like a swimmer off the blocks". I can’t recall the other two books I’ve read, The Dirty Secrets Club and China Lake, being so overloaded with similes, so I’m not sure if this is something she always does or if I’m just more attuned to it right now because I’ve been doing a lot of reading about writing lately. Either way, it left me feeling a bit empty. If this is your first Meg Gardiner book, don’t give up on her. She’s done so much better. Hopefully this is just a bump in the road.