Remember Me

✍ Scribed by Clark, Mary Higgins

• Book ID: 112632807
• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 150 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0671867091

✦ Synopsis

In Remember Me, Menley Nichols and her husband, Adam, a criminal attorney, rent a house on serene Cape Cod, in the hope of restoring their faltering marriage. The birth of their daughter, Hannah, has revitalized their relationship, but Menley has never stopped blaming herself for the accidental death of her two-year-old son. In Remember House, an eighteenth-century landmark with a sinister past, strange incidents force Menley to relive the fatal accident, and she begins to fear for Hannah’s safety. Then Adam takes on a client suspected of murder when his wealthy young bride of only three months drowns in a storm—and the family is drawn into a rising tide of terror. A confrontation on a dark, rain-swept beach leads to a harrowing climax that only Mary Higgins Clark could have created.

From Publishers Weekly

A tinge of the supernatural flavors the latest entry from our leading practitioner of the damsel-in-distress school of suspense. Just what is the mysterious presence that seems to haunt Menley Nichols and baby Hannah in their spectacular rented Cape Cod mansion? Menley is still trying to recover from the horror of her two-year-old son Bobby's death on the railroad crossing. Lawyer husband Adam is too busy dashing to and from New York, and defending a local hunk suspected of doing away with his wealthy bride, to be much help. And so the presence moves in on Menley, Rebecca style, with eerie middle-of-the-night sound effects and rocking cradles. As always with Clark, there are several plots going on at once, which are miraculously blended and resolved in the finale; people to watch out for here include a pretty waitress in a local inn and a real estate lady who is an old flame of Adam's. Clark opens herself to charges of excessive authorial legerdemain by employing many narrative points of view, including those of at least two guilty parties (without ever offering a clue as to their guilt), but that's a quibble. The denouement is reasonably pulse-pounding, if a little strained. All in all, it's a reliable enough outing for the countless Clark aficionados, though it seems, perhaps in sync with its historic setting, rather more old-fashioned than usual. 750,000 first printing; Literary Guild main selection; S & S audio.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Everything you'd expect from the reigning queen of prepubescent female suspense: A bereaved young mother battles demons from a recent mystery, from the distant past, and from her own fearful imaginings about the impending fate of her infant daughter. Two years after her son Bobby is killed in a collision with a train, children's author Menley Nichols, still haunted by anxiety attacks about Hannah, the daughter whose birth reunited her with her estranged lawyer husband, Adam, is vacationing with them in Remember House in the Cape Cod town of Chatham. What seems like a remake of Gaslight--Menley starts to hear Bobby calling to her, friends and neighbors report seeing her in places she doesn't remember being--heats up when Adam accepts an unseasonable client: Scott Covey, the penniless charmer accused of drowning his moneyed wife, Vivian, in a scuba accident. Chatham has already closed ranks against Scott, who evidently carried on a romance with main-chance local waitress Tina Aroldi till shortly before his own (very recent) wedding: Only Adam's old friend, realtor Elaine Atkins, and Scott's neighbor Henry Sprague back up his story of mutual devotion. As Adam chases leads that might help clear Scott, Menley, egged on by cryptic hints from Henry's Alzheimer-ravaged historian wife, Phoebe, immerses herself in another mystery: the riddle of why Mehitabel Freeman, for whom Remember House was first built 300 years before, went to her death denying the charge of adultery (though the other man in the case admitted it) that allowed her seafaring husband to take her own baby away. With such a tangle of villainous plots, you'd expect as many loose ends as in I'll Be Seeing You (1993). Miraculously, though, Clark, working like a steam engine, pulls everything together in a story that suits her gifts for compelling narrative (and her pulpish limitations) perfectly. Readers more interested in mystery than menace may well find this her best book yet. (Literary Guild main selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.