JUST TAKE MY HEART
Mary Higgins Clark
Simon & Schuster
Thriller
ISBN: 9781416570868
JUST TAKE MY HEART by Mary Higgins Clark presents a puzzle whose pieces tantalize readers from the first sentence to the final paragraph.
Assistant District Attorney Emily Wallace is given the case of a lifetime. Actress Natalie Raines was murdered two years ago, but nobody was ever charged with the crime. That is, until now, when career criminal Jimmy Easton comes forward to say the woman’s husband approached him with a plan to kill her. After a due diligence investigation, Gregg Aldrich, also Natalie’s theatrical agent, is indicted. But he insists that he is innocent and would never hurt the woman he loved with all his heart, despite their impending divorce. He was obsessed with his wife and never made a secret of it. He and his 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage cling to the hope that he will be exonerated.
But the past raises an ugly fact. Almost 20 years ago, Jamie Evans, Natalie’s roommate, was killed in Central Park. Her assailant was never found and the case remains open. While attending a party, Natalie is positive she sees the man who murdered Jamie. He spots her too, and she knows he recognizes her. Terrified, she flees for her life. Because Natalie took off to the Cape to hide and didn’t tell anyone about this encounter, nobody knows she saw him and made the connection to Jamie. Though stressed and frightened, she heads back home. When she pulls into the garage, she is yanked from her car, dragged into her house and brutally slain. Nobody saw anything, even though it was a bright morning.
A neighbor’s housekeeper, a raving fan of Natalie’s, observes Natalie’s garage and car doors open on her way to work in the morning. Then, when she is leaving for the night, she sees the same scene and senses something is wrong. She decides to investigate and finds Natalie dying on her kitchen floor. The woman tries to comfort the young actress and calls 911. Natalie dies before the ambulance has a chance to get there. “Her last thought was the sentence Blanche DuBois utters at the end of [A Streetcar Named Desire]: ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’” Natalie had just finished an overwhelmingly successful run of the play on Broadway.
This is how JUST TAKE MY HEART opens, and from this point on the suspense is visceral and the pace of the narrative swift. Aldrich was granted bail, thus he is free to roam the city and spend time with his daughter. At the same time, prosecutor Wallace is diligently building a fortress of a case against him. She understands that her boss, Edward “Ted” Scott Wesley, needs Aldrich convicted. He has been tagged to become the Attorney General of the United States, and putting this case behind him with a score in the win column could help boost his chances. He is so driven he will not hear anything from anyone, especially Emily, that might point to another murderer.
But Emily has more problems than those at work. Her neighbor, “Zach,” is a nosey parker and makes clear his interest in Emily. When she needs a dog sitter he volunteers and talks her into giving him a key to her house because she spends hundreds of hours at work on this case. He gives her the creeps, but when she comes home and finds him sitting on her porch watching television after midnight, she tells him she can manage on her own. She has no idea who he really is and how much danger she has attracted to herself…just because of who she is and how she looks.
As the justice system makes its slow advances in the case, Emily’s life will become fodder for every tabloid and news program. This is painful to the young war widow who has secrets of her own she would like to keep hidden. Once the trial begins, Emily barely has time to do anything except work. Even when she starts having doubts about the guilt of Aldrich, she knows she must convict him or her boss will bring the house down on her head. And every day another story about her appears in the media.
Of the two investigators who work with the DA’s office, Billy Tryon is Ted Wesley’s cousin. And he is not above “bending” the facts to fit the script that will lead to a conviction in the Aldrich case. He and Emily have always crossed swords, and she has never trusted him. On the other hand, his partner Jake Rosen is a straight arrow who has always been the buffer between the two of them. He develops conflicting feelings when Emily really starts questioning the evidence and its provenance.
Mary Higgins Clark rarely misses the mark when she writes a book. Her sense of balance among tension, plot, suspense and characters is limned in the 28 novels she has published. In her Acknowledgements she writes: “We…live in a time of medical miracles. Every day, lives are saved that even a generation ago would have been lost. A number of times I have written novels that touched on this subject.” Now readers again will wend their way through the “hearts of darkness” into the light where justice is served, and they have come away from this book thinking how ironic life really is.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
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