Niki’s Review: Forgive Me by Kateri Stanley

This book is full of twists and turns. It’s told from several perspectives, and it just got its claws in me and I had to find out what was going on and how it would end.

Most of the book is in third person and the murderer’s POV is in first. Sometimes this can be jarring, but it works here and holds the suspense while figuring out who everyone is and how all these pieces fit together. The book also jumps around from past to present and everywhere in between. Again, something that doesn’t always work out, but works for me in this book. It unfolds in such an interesting way.

Stripe’s father was murdered on her senior prom night by an infamous and unknown serial killer called the night scrawler, so named because he nicknames his victims much like the killer in the movie Seven (Stripe’s father is Monster). Her grief and the lack of answers drive her into investigative journalism, and she spends her maternity leave solving the case and finding the insane truth.

She almost gets killed, there is a copycat, babies being sold into research programs and babies with serial killer fathers…I mean, it sounds crazy (and it is) but Stanley absolutely makes this work. Pick up a copy. This one is worth a read.

**Spoilers Below**

*Seriously, I spoil the whole book so keep reading at your own risk*

This book was really fun to read, but I will admit, I missed A LOT on my first read through. This book has a very unique structure. It has both first and third person POV’s with several chapters from the POV of characters who are only there for that one chapter. They tell us about the killer or find his victims. We only need them for a minute. I like when people use this technique. There are also chapters from both killers and in my brain for a long time, even though one was in first person and one was in third person, I just kept trying to make them one character. They grew up together and had similar motivations and I had a hard time telling them apart. They are close…both serial killers who stalk Stripe, so I know why I was confused. But no. There are two of them.

I’m not sure how to dive into this one because it jumps all over the timeline and has a few different POVs. I think I’ll just go in the order of the book. Hold on because we have a lot of ground to cover and it is a wild ride!

We start in an unnamed first person POV in 2017. Whoever he is (and it’s not clear he’s a he for a while, but he is so I’m just going to spoil that right away) is hanging outside someone’s house. He’s stalking someone who, in turn, is tracking him. And voyeur mystery man knows the cops are after him. It’s pretty clear they aren’t looking for him because he’s a voyeur. Nah, he’s a killer. (I’m going to do my best to call this guy Voyeur).

Voyeur watches the woman as she picks up her baby. He focuses on the baby’s looks, like her big blue eyes, and wonders if the mother remembers the night he fathered the child. I mean…I am not sure what to think here yet. But, like, yer creepy.

He continues to watch her as the woman falls asleep with her baby. The Voyeur murderer goes back and forth in thinking he hopes baby momma pretends he’s dead, hoping she forgets him, glad the baby will never remember him, and also hoping that he can somehow be a part of their lives.

We jump to 2015 (it is in 3rd person now for a while) and meet Stripe. A young, sought-after reporter. She’s got a new assignment, an exposé of Isaac Payne. Isaac is a young, genius entrepreneur. I think I already know what’s going to happen with these two (wags eyebrows).

While researching Isaac, Stripe gets another request. This one for a documentary on an infamous still-at-large murderer called the Night Scrawler. And, hold on, this request isn’t because she’s such a fancy-smanchy reporter. No, no. This one is because her own father was a victim. She nopes out of that request, as she always has, and heads off to meet Isaac.

She meets Isaac. He’s younger and better looking than she expected with pretty blue eyes. For just a second he seems familiar but she has no idea why. They have a weird conversation about an old flame of Stripe’s named Cameron. It was weird for a couple reasons. One, I’ll get into later. Second, she’s supposed to be interviewing him and goes on for some time about an old flame from years ago kind of with no clear reason, and it just isn’t a situation I can see happening in real life. And last was that Isaac says he remembers her from his class at NYU. I literally couldn’t name 10 people outside my social circle I went to college with. Apparently, I had a (future) Olympian in my class and everything and I didn’t even recognize him at the games. So, sure, he could just be more observant than me, but NYU is way bigger than the school I went to so it just struck me as odd that he would even have known Cameron. (this bit is maybe one of my only quibbles with the book, but I can’t explain it until later because at this point in reading I didn’t know WHY it bothered me)

They talk about his company and it’s casually (not casually. It’s very much brought up by Stripe, but I figured the media request was weighing on her mind) brought up that Stripe’s father was murdered. He asks if the guy was ever caught, and she tells him no. She’s an interesting reporter that, while interviewing people, tells them A LOT about herself.

We jump back in time to 1989 and Child-Stripe is wandering through the woods, just like her parents warned her not to do. She runs into a boy about her age. He’s filthy and says he’s lost but when Stripe offers him help, he says he doesn’t have a home. Then he leans over and kisses her as she focuses on his pretty blue eyes. She pulls away and notices his hands are red but when she asks him about them, he runs away. She tells her mom about it, and she doesn’t believe her daughter.

We move to the 90s and meet a bunch of Stripe’s friends and they are all in high school. Stripe is going on about all the murders (her dad hasn’t been killed yet), and her friends are irritated with the conversation. Then we meet Cameron (you remember, the girl Stripe dated and mentioned to Isaac). She’s a tough tom-boy who is standoffish and aggressive. She complements Stripe’s jacket and Stripe immediately assumes she’s being made fun of. Totally understand that reaction Stripe. I’ve been there.

Stripe goes to her friends and tells them about the whole thing, and they mock Cameron for being a freak and they think she’s gay. They then say Cameron is probably crushing on Stripe. This bothers Stripe and she confronts Cameron and they have an awkward conversation about Cameron being a lesbian and being creepy. Cameron blows her off.

Later they get in a fight during PE and get detention together. They are forced to spend the detention time alone together cleaning. No supervision. Two hot-headed teens who just physically fought are left alone with their punishment. In the real world, this would be so stupid and bad, but this is a book, so you know where this is leading. The funniest thing about the whole situation is that they clean well. Like, Stipe is doing it wrong, and Cameron corrects her. Like, eff that. School’s pay people to clean and I pay to go there. I’ll suffer through and do my punishment, but I’m not getting down on my hands and knees and scrubbing the floor better than I do at my own house. Nope. Give me a mop and I’ll use the same dirty water to clean the whole building. You get what you pay for.

Cameron gives Stripe a ride home and they talk some more, and they are already bonding. Love is in the air, my friends.

Stripe gets home, has dinner with her parents, watches the news about that serial killer (we’ve now learned where he gets his moniker. He scrawls mean things about the victims—think the movie Seven—in their blood. The latest victim gets “Liar”), and remarks about how weird it is seeing her dad (pacing like the news really bothers him) because he’s never home from work this long. She goes to bed and thinks of the weird kiss with that strange blue-eyed boy in the woods.

Cameron and Stipe bond in detention again the next day. They talk about prom. Cameron isn’t going. Stripe is making her own dress because of a competition. Cameron thinks the dress should be red because it will complement her skin and hair. Cameron says they should see a movie together. Stripe is adorably high-school awkward about it but agrees. They start a secret ‘friendship’ where they meet up and make out and such. Neither Cameron nor Stripe tell anyone about it.

However, her friends pretty quickly find out because Cameron and Stripe are outside dry humping under the bleaches at school and her friends see her. They assume she’s with some guy.

When I write it here, it sounds so eye-rollingly stupid (I promise Stanley did a good job writing it, it just sounds weird when I boiled it down). But boy do I remember being a dumb ass highschooler and this is totally realistic. I assume even more so for a non-straight kid in the 90s. So yeah, I buy it.

Some of Cameron’s ‘friends’ cause a big scene at school calling both Cameron and Stipe dykes and just being a bunch of douche bags. Again, feels accurate for 90s high school, sadly. Very sorry to anyone who dealt with (or still deals with) this kind of BS today. There is a huge brawl and Stripe’s friends jump in to join and help defend Stripe, but they somehow miss all the gay bashing and don’t realize Cameron and Stripe are together.

After, Cameron breaks it off with Stripe.

Prom rolls around and Stripe is lamenting all the changes and the fact that her friends are splitting up after school. And, of course, she misses Cameron.

Then Cameron is there. At the prom where she insisted she wouldn’t be. Cameron apologizes for ending it the way she did and they make out on the dance floor. Finally, her friends realize she’s with Cameron, or, was with, as it were.

Stripe, happy and content for the first time in a long time heads home. She’s greeted by the news that her dad has been murdered by the Night Scrawler. Though she didn’t really seem close to her dad, I assume that would still be a gut punch. This whole part is made so much worse when we learn who the Night Scrawler is.

We jump back to 2015 with Stripe and Isaac where she’d just ‘finished her story’ (and for a minute I thought she’d recounted everything I’d just read about the boy in the woods, Cameron and Stripe’s relationship, and prom until I realized she probably meant the murder of her father. How funny would it be if she went there to interview this guy about his company though and just went on for like an hour about all that?

They talk about his company, which is an online thing like Facebook for art and creators, and he’s a millionaire. Stripe confronts him about a picture she saw on his profile. His mom is Cameron’s mom. He denies it and Stripe comments that they have similar coloring and asks if they are related. He again denies it. She finally lets it go and then asks why he never asked about her name. When he says he wouldn’t ask such a question, she is suspicious, asking if they’ve met before.

As soon as she asks, she gets woozy and passes out. She dreams about her father’s murder and sees the word MONSTER dripping with his blood. The night scrawler shows up in his mask and threatens her and then she wakes up cuffed to a four-poster bed in Isaac’s home with him apologizing and saying he’s run out of options. So that’s…not great.

We jump forward two years later and learn the murders have started up. Either the original or a copy-cat. Then we flash back to the woman from the beginning that has the baby with the blue eyes. They are outside and the woman finds two roses and footprints left by Creeper that had been watching her in the beginning. She laments about not having stopped the murderer when she had the chance.

We jump back into first person POV with Voyeur. He’s now broken into the woman and baby’s house. He then victim blames her for not expecting him to break in. He then reveals the blue eyed baby is his. He thinks about the night the baby was conceived and wonders why he wasn’t charged with murder and rape after. “Why haven’t you told anybody? Are you scared about their reactions? Do you regret having a baby with a monster?” He’s creepy enough that I regret they had a kid. That poor baby. But I digress.

While watching the woman move around her house, Voyeur’s internal monologue confirms that he is a murderer, but he isn’t the one killing the most recent batch of victims. So, good, I guess.

He creeps into his daughter’s room while thinking about her ice blue eyes and as he leaves, mom bashes him over the head and then whispers his ‘real’ name before he passes out.

**We’re getting into big spoilers here. I’m spoiling the twist and destroying the mystery. Don’t keep reading if you haven’t read “Forgive Me” and want to without knowing what happens. Ye be warned**

Back to 2015 with Stipe tied to the bed. She asks Isaac WTF and he says he must show her something. Stripe focuses on his ICE BLUE EYES (I’m hinting hard here. I was pretty sure this was significant by the third time I’d read about eye colors because it takes 50 pages for us to learn Stripe has green eyes, but there are a couple significant folks here with these blue eyes and we hear about their eye colors immediately when we meet each one).

Anyway, instead of freaking out or, you know, any normal reaction, she’s excited because now she knows she has a good story about the guy. Isaac talks about Cameron in a weird cryptic way and then says he needs to ‘show her’. He starts a video and it’s of Stripe’s father torturing Isaac as a child.

We flash back to the late 80s with the ‘training’ Isaac received. Somehow his hearing is strong enough he can hear everyone’s heartbeats. He can hear a baby deer walking and he pounces from his hiding spot and strangles the fawn to death while crying. The dead fawn was taken away and he was left alone to cry on the floor. Tests included things like shoving broken glass into his skin to ‘test his pain threshold’. And this is Stripe’s dad. You know, the one who’s been murdered and she’s so sad about it even though he was never around because he was so busy with work. Probably for the best, Stripe, he seems like human garbage.

A couple years later, the boy escapes and while running through the forest, barefoot and bloodied, he comes across a young girl and kisses her. So, Isaac is the weird boy Stripe met as a child. Interesting. After the kiss, Isaac runs off and finds a couple. He tells them everything and they adopt him and raise him after he convinces them by showing them the same tape he’s showing Stripe. Later, growing up, he ‘becomes’ Cameron so that he can go to school and be safe. I’m not really clear on how you can just invent a person, get them in school saying he’s your kid with no documentation of having a child, and then when that child graduates and gets accepted to NYU he can just ‘change back’ to Isaac and there are no issues. But honestly, that really isn’t the point, and it can probably be done. I’m just saying that I, personally, would have found those details interesting because I know weird stuff happens in real life and it’s always so fascinating. But I’m rambling so let’s get back to this.

Isaac tells us how he tracked down everyone in the program who ‘trained’ him and starts killing them one by one. Then he finds Stripe. She just happens to be in the same grade and the same school as ‘Cameron’ and he hates her and is drawn to her. He falls in love. You know, and then murders her dad and heads out to meet her at prom and make out a bit before saying goodbye. He’s swell.

He flashes back to the present and realizes he wasn’t super gentle when relaying his past and Stripe is upset. He’s surprised she attacks him. For admitting he’d lied to her for years, oh, and killed a bunch of people including her father. He escapes her attacks and then leaves the room. She’s, you remember, still chained to the bed so she just has to chill in the bed of a serial killer. Just another Tuesday, I guess. Haha.

He takes her some food and apologizes and she’s just like, ‘whatever, leave me in here alone’ and he does. He takes some conference calls and works on his website and just goes on with his day with a kidnap victim in his bedroom.

You know what’s weird about the whole thing, Stripe is just like ‘whatever’ about him being Cameron. She doesn’t really react at all. She cries about her dad dying and watches the tape a few more times. But aside from the attack on Isaac, she doesn’t really seem overly bothered by that either. Girl must be in some serious shock. I’m sure being chained to a bed doesn’t help. I just cannot imagine someone murdering my father and then joining me at prom to make out with me. I cannot get over that series of events. I, unlike stripe (spoiler) would never forgive that person.

Isaac finishes working and unlocks her chains and is bummed out when she runs away. He kept her keys but forgot to lock the front door and she bolts. She runs around outside screaming for help and Isaac finds her easily and promises not to chain her back up and convinces her to come back with him. It only took ‘minutes’. To be fair, she wants the truth and knows he can kill her if he wants. I’m not sure that would be enough for me to go back, but at least she has a reason.

Isaac drives her to the labs where he was raised and tortured. She finds a photo of her family that her father had left there. They leave and head back to Isaac’s place where they hook up. She does her walk of shame in the morning (can it be that simple if you’re leaving a serial killer’s bed? The guy who murdered your father?) and drives home.

We flash forward to the woman and the baby (who we now know is Stripe and Isaac’s baby) and she has him chained up in the basement and she realizes she missed him. Love is a weird thing, guys.

We go back to the first person POV and we know now that it’s Isaac. I mentioned earlier that I was confused by the two stalkery murderers who watch Stripe. One earlier leaves a rose and it’s not until now that I realize that WASN’T Isaac, it was the other dude. This was (for me) the most confusing thing in this book. Still confuses me a little bit. I think that’s the point.

But anyway…

There is a murder while Isaac is chained in the basement, proving he isn’t the current serial killer (or, at least, not the only one. Hello, Scream, anyone?). But Stripe believes him and unchains him, kisses him, and takes him upstairs (not to talk). Bow-chicka-bow-wow

We switch back to the other murderer’s POV, who I’m going to call Creeper (he’s called the Hunter in the book, but I like Creeper better). Creeper is watching them get it on from outside. He’s angry. We get another flash back. He’s in the same place as Isaac, but he doesn’t seem to be being tortured, at least, not yet.

I am starting to see their differences. Both serial killers? Yes. But, Voyeur was watching because he’s Isaac, a killer who loves Stripe and fathered her child. Creeper is creeping, and we aren’t entirely sure why, but it is connected to Isaac.

Anyway, Creeper is hanging out outside Stripe’s home, just thinking about all the ways when he can kill her when the ghost of one of his victims shows up (not really, Creeper is just seeing things. He sees her a lot and they have long conversations).

We then get a flashback to Creeper’s mom. Turns out, she sold him into the program where he was abused and tortured. Creeper’s real name is Isaiah.

We flash way back to the late 70s and the founding of the project after Stripe admits she spent her maternity leave tracking down where Isaac really ‘came from’. Heather is one of the project’s founder’s daughters and she’s in a bad state. They ask her to join the program and she agrees. Heather, with her icy blue eyes, seduces and sleeps with some lab guy one rainy night a few months later. A couple months later, Heather is in for an ultrasound. She, like Isaiah’s mother, is going to give the baby to the program. In return, she is going to get treatment to get off the drugs she’s hardcore addicted to. Or so she thinks. You see, she dies after birth and the baby is handed over to Stripe’s father who could not care less about the woman’s death. The baby is Isaac. So, he’s a monster who buys a baby from a desperate woman so he can turn that baby boy into a killing machine. More than once. Cool. He’s not even slightly bothered that she died. He’s a dad. I just…what an asshole.

In current time, Creeper goes to Stripe’s office and is creepy, so they call her and let her know someone is looking for her. Both she and Isaac assume he’s someone angry about the last article she wrote, but we know better. He’s somehow connected to Isaac and probably hating on her because her dad ran the program that ruined both Creeper and Isaac’s lives. Stripe should be glad her father was so absent in her life. He’s gross.

Isaac freaks out about the news of Creeper at Stripe’s office and convinces her to come stay with him and call her mom to tell her to get out of Dodge, which she does. Just as they are peeling away from the house, Creeper sees them.

Stripe’s mom, instead of listening and taking the threat seriously, takes a handgun and shows up at Stripe’s place just after Stripe leaves and falls into the hands of Creeper. And you know what? Serves her dumb ass right. What did she think she was going to accomplish? Sigh.

After repeated phone calls to her mother, Stripe finally gets an answer. From Creeper.

I’m going to stop here and not spoil the ending. I will say that Stripe’s mother isn’t Creeper’s only captive. He lures Stripe in, and she’s got to make some tough choices. Everyone is in very real danger and not everyone is going to make it out alive. But if you want to know how it ends, you’re going to have to read it yourself. Or get the audiobook!

If you’re interested in checking out Kateri Stanley, she’s got a website and is on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

She also has a new book coming out called From the Deep and you can pre-order it HERE.