Paul Cleave, Trust No One

Jerry Grey is a successful crime novelist who is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's at the age of only 49. As his dementia worsens, he begins losing the ability to separate his real life from the stories he's published. His behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable and problematic, and he winds up confessing to murder.

The good news is that the crime he confesses to is from the pages of his first book. The bad news is that that book was based on a true story, the murder of Jerry's neighbor, and neither he nor we can be confident that Jerry is not in fact the knife-wielding sadist who killed the girl. There are other murders too, and Jerry looks pretty good for those crimes as well.

The story jumps around, moving forward from Jerry's diagnosis, and it's picked up again later, after a major event that slowly gets pieced together. Jerry is quite the unreliable narrator, since his memory is spotty, and the information he gets from others may or may not be accurate.

Part of the story is told by Jerry in his "Madness Journal," which he began writing early on as a way of reminding his future forgetful self about things.

The story kept me guessing—although I actually guessed pretty well, as it turned out. The author cleverly keeps us and his protagonist in the dark, and it is all very confusing but nicely woven together, except for two things.

First, the book should have been shorter. It dragged in parts, particularly the Madness Journal parts. And second, and more importantly, the Alzheimer's aspect of the plot just can't be taken seriously. As a patient with advanced dementia, Jerry is just far too competent, piecing clues together and reading his old notes, writing, making phone calls, getting around town.

Plus, he has an alter ego who is taking on a life of his own, as if a split personality is characteristic of the disease. So I kind of pretended that Jerry had some unspecified disease that diminished him mentally while allowing him to do the stuff he was allegedly doing, and that helped.