Walk Into Yesterday by Mildred Davis

Published in USA 1967
In the UK in 1969 under the title ‘Nightmare of Murder’

Gothic Suspense

This book counts towards the R.I.P VIII challenge!

on the back of the book:
“If you have total amnesia and people are trying to kill you because if you begin remembering you will know too much – well, it isn’t exactly a new situation, but it’s a strong one, and Mildred Davis does a lovely job of developing it into Walk Into Yesterday. Like so much of Davis’ work, this is at once sensitive and perceptive as a novel and beautifully tricky as a puzzle – the kind of book it would be a pleasure to reread, to see how skillfully and legitimately you were deceived.”       ~New York Times

Jane is in some kind of institution — she can’t remember her own face — there are strange scars on her arms and legs. The doctor has told her she’s been in a serious accident. She has many memories, but no way to distinguish reality from fantastic dreams. Then a stranger appears, and advises her that, for her own safety, some things are better left forgotten!

Jane is in a sanitarium following a terrible accident she can’t remember. There are only a few other residents. The Doctor in charge inherited the home from his grandfather and he is only planning on keeping it until the residents there have passed away as they have no where else to go. He takes in Jane as a favor to a friend who is Jane’s guardian. It seems all of her family are gone now. All she has is the guardian a trusted family friend and a fiance, both of which she doesn’t remember.

She’s remembering snippets here and there. She remembers her father holding her and playing with her but the Dr. said her father died when she was just months old. She remembers her family telling her not to marry her fiance as he is a bad man. There’s the reoccurring dream about overhearing a conversation about guns and shooting someone. Was it a dream or a memory and was it a plot to kill someone? And there is the memory of the terrible fire! Was that where she was injured? No one is telling her anything. She’s in a wheel chair unable to walk, but the Dr. says that should come back to her as her strength grows. Then the stranger appears and threatens her life. How did he even know she was beginning to remember things? Who can she trust? Is her fiance behind the plot? Is he really her fiance? What happened to her nurse, Zee, who heard the voices Jane heard in the night too?

Lots of great suspense! I read this in 2 days last weekend with convenient thunderstorms and all! This is my second Mildred Davis and I liked it just as well as the first I read. Will be looking for all the rest of her novels too! Check out previous post I did on another book by her HERE and HERE is a nice bibliography of her work with synopsis.

‘She has a gift for embedding terror into the harmless ordinariness of mid-century suburbia, yet without distorting the essential nature of that world. And her special genius is to transport the reader into the very consciousness of her protagonist. To read a Mildred Davis novel is to live someone else’s life for a couple of hours.’   ~Richard K. Aylesworth

So true! Do yourself a favor and find a Mildred Davis and curl up in comfy chair and enjoy!

Peggy Ann