The Memory Game is a psychological thriller

Psychological thriller

Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the broad ranged thriller with heavy focus on characters. However, it often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre, along with the typical traits of the thriller genre...

 by London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 journalists, Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, under the pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 Nicci French

Nicci French

Nicci French is the pseudonym of English husband-and-wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, who write psychological thrillers together.-Personal life:...

. It was their first novel (followed by The Safe House) and originally published by William Heinemann

William Heinemann

William Heinemann was the founder of the Heinemann publishing house in London.He was born in 1863, in Surbiton, Surrey. In his early life he wanted to be a musician, either as a performer or a composer, but, realising that he lacked the ability to be successful in that field, he took a job with...

 in 1997.

Plot

The novel concerns the account of one Jane Martello, a middle aged woman undergoing divorce proceedings with her husband, and subsequently separating herself from a large and strong family she has known since her childhood. The intricate traditions of her family and the one she had married into begin to break down when the body of her sister-in-law, Natalie, is found buried in the garden, after over two decades. This startlingly close distance to the house leads to the revelation of the murderer being very close to the family after all. The revelation acts to bring down the family structure that for so long was unbalanced, but stable - such as Jane's father-in-law, Alan, an openly crude and sexist novelist having once frequently had relations outside his marriage (to the knowledge of the whole family) and other underlying tensions between family members.

Jane undergoes psychiatric counselling, as she revels in the mysterious circumstances of one of her best childhood friend's death, and already present forerunnings to what appear to be a mid-life crisis

Mid-life crisis

Midlife crisis is a term coined in 1965 by Elliott Jaques and used in Western societies to describe a period of dramatic self-doubt that is felt by some individuals in the "middle years" or middle age of life, as a result of sensing the passing of their own youth and the imminence of their old age...

. She undergoes a memory exercise (that the book is named for) to unlock memories lost from the trauma of her friend's death. What she unlocks proves seemingly to be the key to the death of Natalie, but the validity of the memories become questionable with the serious allegations they lead to.