My Review of Just Take My Heart by Mary Higgins Clark

May 3, 2009

I was really excited about getting the first copy from the library. After reading it, I’m happier that I didn’t purchase this book.

I was disappointed in it. I’ve read all of Mary Higgins Clark’s books and lately I have not enjoyed them as much.

This book was a quick read. I read it over the weekend.

Here is a synopsis of the novel from Amazon.com:

Natalie Raines, one of Broadway’s brightest stars, accidentally discovers who killed her former roommate and sets in motion a series of shocking events that puts more than one life in extreme peril.

While Natalie and her roommate, Jamie Evans, were both struggling young actresses, Jamie had been involved with a mysterious married man to whom she referred only by nickname. Natalie comes face to face with him years later and inadvertently addresses him by the nickname Jamie had used. A few days later, Natalie is found in her home in Closter, New Jersey, dying from a gunshot wound.

Immediately the police suspect Natalie’s theatrical agent and soon-to-be-ex-husband, Gregg Aldrich. He had long been a “person of interest” and was known to have stalked Natalie to find out if she was seeing another man. But no charges are brought against him until two years later, when Jimmy Easton, a career criminal, suddenly comes forward to claim that Aldrich had tried to hire him to kill his wife. Easton knows details about the Aldrich home that only someone who had been there — to plan a murder, for instance — could possibly know.

The case is a plum assignment for Emily Wallace, an attractive thirty-two-year-old assistant prosecutor. As she spends increasingly long hours preparing for the trial, a seemingly well-meaning neighbor offers to take care of her dog in her absence. Unaware of his violent past, she gives him a key to her home…

As Aldrich’s trial is making headlines, her boss warns Emily that this high-profile case will reveal personal matters about her, such as the fact that she had a heart transplant. And, during the trial, Emily experiences sentiments that defy all reason and continue after Gregg Aldrich’s fate is decided by the jury.

In the meantime, she does not realize that her own life is now at risk.

It sounded pretty good from the flap, but the plot of this novel was weak and a bit boring.

I really did not understand the serial killer next door thing she had going on.  What was the point in that sub plot? It was not suspenseful and I did not ever get why he wanted to kill the main character. All the other people he killed before were ex-wives and family of those women. So what was it about the woman next door that made him decide he wanted to kill her…and then wait months to do it. Why? That was never really addressed.

The thing that really bugged me about the novel was an issue with editing the book. In the beginning of the book when Natalie is murdered it says she drove into the garage and got out of her car. She was going to click the door closed, but for some reason she didn’t. Then later a women noticed that her garage door was still open and her car was parked inside. Her car door was open also, like it had been that morning. This women then went inside the garage, etc. All about a garage, right?

Fast forward to later in the novel. The husband is on trial for the murder and is talking about the same house and says:

“Years ago, the garage was converted into a recreation room and no one ever got around to building a new one. There was no garage that another car could have been in. When I drove past the house, I saw only her car in the driveway, and I knew she was alone.”

So which is it? Did she drive into and park in the garage or was the garage converted into a rec room and she parks in the driveway?

Inconsistencies like that in a book drive me crazy.

I also figured out whodunit early on (same thing with her novel before this one), so either I’m getting better or Mrs. Clark’s books are getting more predictable.

Maybe it is time I wrote my own…

Posted in Random Stuff From My Life