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Review by Sandy Huseby
In her newest novel of suspense, her thirteenth, Mary Higgins Clark offers up a vintage blend of her signature storytelling. Lacey Farrell is an up-and-coming Manhattan real estate agent who Isabelle Waring contacts to sell her daughter's apartment.
Isabelle turns to Lacey as a confidante, telling Lacey she doesn't believe her daughter's recent death was an accident. When Isabelle calls to insist Lacey come to her apartment, the young woman has mixed emotions at Isabelle's growing reliance on her.
Those emotions are shattered when Lacey becomes an unwitting eyewitness to Isabelle's murder. Lacey's sense of responsibility goes far beyond eyewitness. What if she'd arrived at the apartment just a few minutes earlier? What if she'd never shown the apartment to Curtis Caldwell, the man who kills Isabelle? Worse still, Caldwell knows she has seen him.
Iabelle has entrusted Lacey with her daughter Heather's journal, certain that the explanation of the mystery surrounding Heather's death is somewhere in those pages. Before she gives the journal to the police, Lacey honors her promise to Isabelle by giving a copy of the journal to her ex-husband, Jimmy Landi. And she keeps a copy for herself.
What follows is a classic hide-and-seek chase, one that exploits all of this mystery master's skills. Clark excels at bringing to life the visceral emotions of her characters and pitting her heroines against great danger. Yet those heroines, as Lacey Farrell demonstrates here in Pretend You Don't See Her, are equal to the challenge.
A Mary Higgins Clark title promises a solid read, dense with intrigue and fresh with vibrant characters. In Pretend You Don't See Her, novel number thirteen is a lucky one indeed: lucky for the reader.
Sandy Huseby is a writer living in Fargo, North Dakota, and Nevis. She is online at SHuseby@aol.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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