Just remembering (Remember Me - Mary Higgins Clark)

Member Name: bilbob20

Product:	Remember Me - Mary Higgins Clark
Date:	25/06/09 (35 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A good story, with good characters and good dialogue

Disadvantages: Its too predictable

Courteousy of a two week holiday in Turkey, and very little to do, I found myself raiding the hotel library (which consisted of little more than a dozen books of interest) for reading matter. There were virtually no authors who I had ever read, although I knew some of them, and I certainly wasn't giving Dan Brown air space. So after I had finished the previous book, I moved onto this fairly swift novel.

After the tragic death of Menley and Adam's son Bobby, they have finally patched things up courteousy of a new born baby. Whisked off to his childhood town Cape Cod, they rent an old house on the beachfront. However, Menley's ghosts aren't entirely at rest, and she soon finds the odd old house a place of ill-ease.

Meanwhile, friendships are forged between the couple, some old school friends of Adam's, and a man who is suspected of murdering his wife. Co-incidently, Adam is a successful lawyer - is there any other kind in this genre - and just happens upon the suspected killer as the suspicions gather credibility.

Thrown into the potboiler is another tale about the origins of the house that Menley and Adam have rented, and a mystery surrounding the couple who it was originally built for. This allows Menley's imagination to run wild as she gathers information from a senile neighbour for a book that she has decided to write about the place.

The first thing to notice about this book was the odd lay out. Once chapter runs into another, and at an approximate 100+ chapters, its obvious that each one is barely more than a paragraph or two. This allows Mary Higgins Clark to break down her various plot threads so quickly that it would be hard for you to lose track or interest. What it does though is make simple work of a book that actually isn't that simple at all.

The biggest problem with Remember Me is that it is too predictable. You really do work out the outcome long before it is revealed, but because Clark is an expert at weaving her various threads, she manages to maintain your imagination until the end. That the reader has probably solved the mystery before the characters have is really neither here nor there when the characterizations are so spot on and enjoyable.

Whats to enjoy more though is a handful of human stories that are plotted to engage you with the characters. Menley's terrible ordeal is used to create a friction and a distance that allows her to become victimised, whilst it also shows her frailty's from the outset. Adam is also a sympathetic character that rarely shows his hand, but you know his motives are genuine.

There are other characters simply there to lead up to the final reveal, just to make more of an impact, and for no other reason are they included. Its also well-handled how we are never quite sure who the villians are, or whether they are quite as bad as we at first think. Clark allows us to question the line between good and bad and just how evil somebody can be. That we get little signals that not everybody is as they seem is what probably spoils the ending, yet it is what makes the characters so believable and well written.

This is one of the few books I have read recently that doesn't suffer from being too talky, and this again is a credit to the excellent writing and the swift layout of the paragraphs. The dialogue rarely grates, and for the most part is believable and true to the different personalities. This was the best find of the books that I discovered on holiday, and I will most probably pick up a few others from her catalogue providing somebody is selling them for 1p on amazon ;)

Summary: A predictable but enjoyable read from an author I most certainly will read more of