Summertime, by Liz Rigbey <br></br>Land of the Living, by Nicci French

Tortured by memories of past nightmares

"Nicci French" is the husband-and-wife team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, who with Land of the Living return to the memory theme their fiction has tackled before. Memory is also crucial in Summertime, Liz Rigbey's second novel, in which the past of the heroine Lucy Schaffer is so malleable she feels she's walking on quicksand. Why do her memories clash with those of other people? Is she mad? Is she a serial killer?

Lucy is a woman grossly singled out for tragedy. Her baby brother drowned when she was four. Her son died a cot death. Her childhood best friend met a horrible end, and her first boyfriend was terribly injured in a crash. Unsurprisingly, her mother has gone mad. Now a successful New York businesswoman, Lucy is summoned back to California when her father is murdered. Here old memories surface brutally, like muggers. Slow-moving, often beautifully written, Rigbey's dark thriller takes the reader on a painful journey of self-discovery. Long swathes of introspection and mundane action are punctuated by sudden chilly surges of tension.

Altogether faster is Land of the Living, which throws the reader straight into the nightmare consciousness of an amnesiac girl awakening in freezing darkness. Slowly, the horror dawns: she is hooded, bound, gagged, the prisoner of a madman. Bit by bit, memories return: her name, Abbie Devereux; her desk at work. At intervals, she is fed and watered just enough to keep her alive by a man known only as a wheezing laugh and a voice in the darkness, speaking a litany of his previous kills.

Nightmare enough, you might think. Imagine enduring such an ordeal for days, escaping against all odds, and then finding that no one believes you. Dismissed by the police, Abbie is expected to pick up her shattered life, aware that the madman is still out there. Though memory has returned, four or five days remain missing. From here on the pace is relentless, as Abbie becomes a detective on her own trail.

Like Lucy, she is tortured with uncertainty. Did it really happen? Was she in some way to blame? Like many a victim, she links the mess of her previous life with the fact that something bad happened.

French's book is the more convincing, though Rigbey's is more literary, with passages of excellent writing: none better than the poignant opening account of a family's train journey across snowbound Russia with a dying baby. Summertime's overall plot is far-fetched, however, and the dénouement somewhat Hollywood.

Land of the Living also makes use of clichés: the denseness of the police, the willingness of the heroine to go deeper into dangerous situations alone. The basic situation, however, seems horribly credible, reminding us of all the times we shuddered and hardly dared ask, "What did the poor girl go through?"

Nothing can be trusted, these books seem to say, but the present moment; even that may be suspect. There is, of course, always survival, but the cost is a terrible one: the knowledge that the worst that can happen, happens, and thereafter remains indelible. Dark waters, indeed.