Forget Me Not

In a quiet coastal town where gardens bloom and memories fade, Forget Me Not unfolds as a haunting, character-driven mystery that explores the fragile boundaries between truth, identity, and the past.

Moira Briggs, a retired Sergeant Major living with young-onset dementia, begins her week with familiar rituals: polishing boots, tending thyme, and remembering her late husband. But when she visits her old home, now rented to her nephew Jamie, she finds it eerily silent. Inside, she discovers Jamie's body, triggering a murder investigation and a reckoning with memory itself.

Detective Constable Callum Reed is meticulous, solitary, and brilliant. Living with autism and OCD, he sees patterns others miss. Assigned to the case, Callum is drawn to Moira's fragmented recollections and military precision. Despite her cognitive decline, Moira becomes a surprising ally with her instincts sharp, her past full of secrets.

A letter is found stabbed into a headboard which was cryptic, emotional, and unsigned. It's a warning, and a clue. They begin to unravel a conspiracy spanning shell companies, erased identities, and a criminal empire built on silence. A gym with no signage. A network with no name. A trail of vanished lives and a trail of silence stretching across borders.

Forget Me Not blends lyrical realism with procedural precision, offering a layered narrative of psychological nuance, emotional resonance, and quiet suspense. It's a story about memory and how it fades, how it endures, and how it can be weaponised. It explores neurodiversity, trauma, and the quiet heroism of care.

With a cast of richly drawn characters including Trina, Moira's intuitive support worker, and Jamie, Moira's nephew, or is he?

Can a person commit murder and forget?

Forget Me Not is a quiet reckoning, a story of buried truths, fractured memory, and the courage to remember.

Michael Anthony Booth is a dementia advisor, creative educator, and literary mystery author based in Hartlepool, UK. His work blends emotional depth with lived experience, drawing on his professional background in dementia support and his own journey with young-onset Alzheimer's. Through his writing and advocacy, he champions dignity, inclusion, and the quiet resilience found in everyday lives. Forget Me Not: The Letter in the Headboard is his debut novel and the first in the Forget Me Not series