At the end of the day, I’m a simple gal. I hear something like “Queer cat and mouse thriller set in Hollywood” and I simply sit down and read it. Which is to say, Isha Raya’s You’ll Never Forget Me had me at hello.
And honestly, I’ve been feeling rather bored with contemporary novels lately, all perfectly therapized characters and nowhere for them to go but up. So, immediately, a premise that opens with “Struggling actress Dimple Kapoor wouldn’t call herself a murderer, per se—she’d prefer the term “opportunist,” had me raring to go. Who needs emotional handholding when there is MURDER to be done and parts to get!
I am delighted to say this book really hit the spot. I’ve a few quibbles, but that’s for later. Mostly? You’ll Never Forget Me is a rip-roaring good time. I want to read this on a pool deck, or on the beach or a nice day in the park. It’s perfect for nice weather, but since I’m trapped on the East Coast in January, I was thrilled to discover that it feels like a spark of gossipy Hollywood drama, all yours for the taking.
Dimple Kapoor, a name I kept expecting myself to hate but instead found myself wildly charmed by, is absolutely a murder. She’s just a murderer with, well, mostly good reasons? I don’t want to spoil any of the big twists, but since it’s established that she is in fact a murder, I will be talking about a couple of said murders. Long winded as hell spoiler warning, sorry!
Anyway, Dimple isn’t having a great time when we meet her at a party thrown by her biggest industry rival, Irene Singh. She really doesn’t mean to kill her, but! Alas, she absolutely does. It’s just that Irene’s death means that there is a big part that’s now open, and Dimple is really the best person for the lead. Acting bag secured, she goes about the business of acting like there was no way she was involved with the death of her rival, which of course, fools the police. I do really love how little this book cares for justice by way of the system. After the police are dispensed with, we meet a team of PIs, one Saffi Mirai Iyer, in particular. She clocks Dimple as the flawless actress she is, and after a series of darkly funny events, Saffi contrives a scheme to use Dimple as “bait” for this supposed Hollywood Killer. This little dance between them is the majority of the book, and it is fun! We all remember the joys of Killing Eve, and the best parts of this book really lean into that energy between Dimple and Saffi. Their chemistry builds naturally, despite not really knowing if this is a first time gay situation for either of them.
It’s not that I need all characters in books to turn to the camera (reader) and say “hello I am a lesbian” or whatever, but I would like at least a vague idea of where our characters are coming from? A baseline of homosexuality, if you will? There is a big difference between “oh this murdery chick is hot” vs “woah I’ve never noticed a woman being hot before!!!” Especially for Dimple, it would have lent a bit more depth to her isolation in Hollywood with being closeted or one of the only out and Brown actresses. Plus, the whole not really a murderer thing.
And let me tell you! This book cranks up quite a bodycount by the end. It’s not that I don’t love a high (nonsexual) body count, because I do! I love all kinds of variations on thriller, ones that leans a little more comedic, ones that lean darker, ones that mediate on the morality around murder and the like. You’ll Never Forget Me is kind of having its cake and eating it too. There are a lot more emotional meditations about what we do to survive than I was expecting, and I found that refreshing. It’s hard to pull off murder and romance and thriller, and one of the reasons this one did is because I did believe these were real fucked up people.
Until the final twist, really, they had me! There were too many important relationships at stake, and I wasn’t ready to believe that these two characters would have ended up here, not yet. That might have been what frustrated me, that it was so close, but just fell short. No, I just figured it out: It didn’t develop the romance element enough to stick the landing. Maybe I wanted even more cat and mousing, maybe I wanted more sex, but I felt that Dimple and Saffi’s relationship needed one more bit of detail to really knock it outta the park.
STILL! Quibbles aside, I had a good time with Dimple and Saffi, and if you’ve ever wanted to push a rival down some stairs, you probably will too!
