On Halloween, it felt fitting to finish reading my first book by the “Queen of Suspense,” Mary Higgins Clark. Obviously, I’ve seen her name across many bookshelves over the years, but I’ve never read one of her books until now. I finished 1999’s, We’ll Meet Again, a sort of we-know-whodunit-but-will-they-be-caught suspense book, with an unexpected twist (is that redundant?) at the end.
Molly is a socialite in Greenwich, Connecticut, married to a famous doctor who heads up the local hospital and a somewhat shady HMO (health maintenance organization). He’s murdered, and she is arrested for the slaying, with the motive of jealousy, as he was having an affair with a young nurse whom he impregnated. She pleaded down and served five years. Shortly after being released, in an effort to clear her name of said murder, she meets with the young nurse. The nurse is then murdered, and yet again, Molly is fingered as the culprit. (I do think it stretches belief, even for a rich socialite, that Molly would have made bail for the second murder after already being convicted on a prior murder.)
Throughout the novel, we have characters with competing motives: Molly’s defense attorney who not-so-secretly adores her and is trying to protect her, but actually sucks as a defense attorney because he thinks she is guilty; Molly’s longtime maid with a child experiencing schizophrenia she’s worried actually committed the murder, so she lies to the police about the original murder and tries to keep him quiet thereafter; the husband’s two business partners, another doctor and a financier, who are interested in keeping Molly culpable (for reasons to be explored later); Jenna, Molly’s best friend, who doesn’t have a clear motive early-on actually; and finally, Fran, who went to school with Molly, and is now working as a TV reporter trying to help uncover the truth about what happened. Fran also has a storied past in Greenwich; her father committed suicide after seemingly robbing a library fund of $400,000.
So, the thing is, we know the husband, the other doctor, and the financier are shady folks from the get-go, especially the latter because he has a fixer who, well, “fixes” things, aka, commits murder and mayhem on his behalf. We just don’t know what exactly is going on at the hospital, other than an impending merger they all want to see go through. As it turns out, influenced by a radical doctor, they all believe in killing the elderly for cost-saving reasons and/or to use them as test subjects for experimental subjects. Yeah, that sort of goes against the whole Hippocratic Oath of “first, do no harm.”
I did think Fran was a good protagonist because she was written smartly. At nearly every turn, she could surmise that what was presented as the truth wasn’t what the truth actually was. Even at the end, when the financier tries to have her firebombed (along with the radical doctor), she is one step ahead, figures out the plot, and survives, allowing her to take down everyone involved and clear Molly’s name. That said, she’s almost too good, at least as it regards how quickly she’s willing to take up Molly’s case. That is, that Molly is innocent. But I’m glad she did! We need more people like her, the guy at the diner, and the old couple at the diner who all did the right thing to clear Molly’s name.
The twist at the end was that the husband was indeed killed out of jealousy, just not by Molly. Instead, it was Jenna who killed the husband because she was having an affair with him and she was jealous he was stepping out on her with the young nurse. Womp womp. Jenna might have confessed a little too neatly and cleanly for my taste after that point, but hey, it’s a lot of threads to tie up at the end.
All in all, I thought Clark was worth reading finally, and that she lived up to her billing as the “Queen of Suspense” because she did keep me guessing as to the “how” and “why” of everything, and surprised me with the twist. I’d recommend giving Clark a read, too, if you haven’t yet.
Milam's Musings 