We get warning signs about Zach Hopkins early on in REMEMBER ME THIS WAY. His character is like a distant figure who always seems to be present, but is also closed off. As he watches on, his internalization expresses deep condemnation to those with whom he comes in contact.

In the prologue, Zach’s already selfish ability to deflect blame and abuse those close to him is expressed through his own writing: “If I know for sure that she’s moved on...I’ll kill her,” he writes in reference to Lizzie Carter. “She has no one to blame but herself.” The humble, sweet and harmless Lizzie still feels Zach’s abuse even after his death. His overwhelming presence continues to haunt her, and when she is asked the question “Do you miss him?” you can feel her pause, as if she fears perhaps he survived his car crash in 2009 and is still around. We never meet Zach in the present. Everything about him --- his past, artistic creations, upbringing and relationships --- is relayed to us from a distance.

"While REMEMBER ME THIS WAY shows promise, it leans too far in its extremes and simply does not have enough depth to engage us properly."

In the opening, set in 2013, Lizzie visits the crash site where he was killed and learns new secrets about his life when she finds flowers and a heart-shaped note from a mysterious woman named Xenia. The length of the novel is spent trying to discover the identity of Xenia, with few clues to guide us. During the time between Zach’s journal entries in 2009 and the present narrative, we follow Lizzie as she traces his steps and gains perspective through his own writings. There’s some genuine affection in how people remember Zach --- artistic, quiet, maligned. But to Lizzie, he was someone else entirely. And who he was alone is yet another identity.

The two meet online. At first he casts off an initial date because her house isn’t nice enough but then breaks into her home. Once in a relationship with Lizzie, he tells her she is “weak and easily led” and then has relations with a woman named Charlotte; he refers to Lizzie as “a waste of space” for her troubles, tells her who she can and cannot see, and refuses to share any of himself with her. He is an insecure, brooding artist, but never seems to carry the weight of genius or any other characteristics that would give him dimension; he is simply sulking and mean.

I believe author Sabine Durrant is striving for a character who is mysterious and vagrant, and harboring deep hurt. But to me, Zach is less complex and more off-putting. You find the way he treats Lizzie questionable at best, while the elephant in the room is what she ever saw in him and why she stayed with him. Interestingly enough, though, she does write a note stating thats he is leaving him. The mystery is whether or not he read the letter before his death.

The format of the book switches from the first-person narrative of Lizzie to Zach’s journal entries, where we’re given insight into his mindset. However, this idea of going from the present to the past between two characters is not as engaging as it could’ve been, and Zach’s writings do little to give any redemption to an already questionable character.

At their heart, psychological thrillers need to tap into a reader’s own psyche. We must find something relatable even to those we detest. Consider Ann Rule’s masterful memoir, THE STRANGER BESIDE ME, a detailed account of the life of serial killer Ted Bundy. As we’re reading it, we’re fooled, much like Bundy’s victims, into liking him and even rooting for him in certain ways. It’s a deep, psychologically complex narrative that works because Bundy, as monstrous as he was, was able to emulate qualities we all share, ones that make us human.

Zach Hopkins would’ve worked in this vein: a good-looking, charismatic artist to whom everyone is attracted, one who only shows his true side to Lizzie Carter, who no ones believes when she tells them who he really is. Instead, Zach is rather dull, abusive and a misery to read about. Learning about him should cause us to be bothered, but it also shoud be the reason we flip pages. While REMEMBER ME THIS WAY shows promise, it leans too far in its extremes and simply does not have enough depth to engage us properly.