The Memory Collector is the second book that Meg Gardiner has written in a new series
featuring San Francisco forensic psychiatrist Jo Bennett.
Jo calls herself a dead shrinker instead of a head shrinker. She is called in to determine
whether a person’s death is natural, accidental, homicide or suicide.
In The Memory Collector, Jo is called in to work on a living subject. A man is on a
plane en route to San Francisco when he panics and tries to open the emergency doors on the plane.
He is restrained and turned over to Dr. Jo Bennett upon landing.
Jo soon discovers that the man has anterograde amnesia. He cannot form new memories. Although
he’s walking and talking, things that are just five minutes in the past are lost to him.
During her work Jo realizes that the patient is a former special agent who lets drop along the
way that he was sent to retrieve a drug that is known as Slick. It would seem as if he has come
in contact with it, and if Jo cannot retrieve the rest of the information from the man’s brain,
many others could be in great danger.
The idea of a psychiatrist for the dead was a bit unsettling, but Ms. Gardiner soon tied it all
together and this made for a great read.