{"id":6730,"date":"2018-09-29T08:55:43","date_gmt":"2018-09-29T12:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?p=6730"},"modified":"2018-09-29T08:55:43","modified_gmt":"2018-09-29T12:55:43","slug":"just-take-my-heart-by-mary-higgins-clark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/29\/just-take-my-heart-by-mary-higgins-clark\/","title":{"rendered":"“Just Take My Heart” by Mary Higgins Clark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Simon & Schuster, 2009<\/a><\/p>\n

I am not a huge fan of Mary Higgins Clark.\u00a0 I find her plots to be contrived and the characters thin.\u00a0 But I have to admit that she is easy to read.\u00a0 Short chapters and no long dialogs.\u00a0 I read this book in less than a week, which is fast for me given all of my other interests and activities.<\/p>\n

The protagonist in this mystery is Emily Wallace, an assistant DA who is both a war widow (her husband was killed in Iraq) and a heart transplant survivor (hence the title).\u00a0 She is given a plum assignment: prosecuting the husband of a prominent stage actress\u00a0 who was accused of murdering her in a fit of rage because she was leaving him.\u00a0 The key witness was a scumbag jailhouse snitch who had a meeting in a bar – witnessed by the defendant’s friends – and, he claimed, a subsequent meeting in the defendant’s home where he remembered many details of the living room, including, most significantly, a side table drawer that squeaked when pulled open.\u00a0 The defendant had a plausible explanation for the first meeting but could not explain how the snitch knew about the squeaky drawer.\u00a0 He was convicted, over the protests of the victim’s mother, who believed him to be innocent.\u00a0 And Emily, rather than being jubilant over her big victory, found herself wondering whether she had sent an innocent man to jail for life.<\/p>\n

But there were no other suspects… or were there?\u00a0 The victim had a roommate many years earlier who was dating a married man.\u00a0 The victim never met this man but did, just once, see a photo that the roommate had secreted in her purse.\u00a0 When the roommate was brutally murdered she had the police draw a composite sketch based on her memory of the photo, but the culprit was never identified.\u00a0 When Emily’s doubts about the guilt of the husband grew, she decided to reopen the investigation into the earlier murder and found that the sketch in the original homicide file did not match the one they had obtained when investigating the later murder of the actress.\u00a0 Why were the sketches different?\u00a0 The answer to that question, of course, led to catching the guy who murdered both women.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile… and this is where the implausible Mary Higgins Clark plot emerges – Emily’s neighbor, who is a serial killer, is stalking her for no good reason, it appears, other than the book needed another villain.\u00a0 He almost gets her, but doesn’t, due to another killer showing up at the same time.\u00a0 Uh… yeah.\u00a0 Well, it is implausible but an easy read.<\/p>\n

The heart transplant is another plot device that has no real use other than to give the book its title.\u00a0 It comes into play in a twist at the very end, also in a most implausible way.<\/p>\n

Silly plot twists, but very readable.<\/p>\n

7 out of 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simon & Schuster, 2009 I am not a huge fan of Mary Higgins Clark.\u00a0 I find her plots to be contrived and the characters thin.\u00a0 But I have to admit that she is easy to read.\u00a0 Short chapters and no long dialogs.\u00a0 I read this book in less than a week, which is fast for … Continue reading »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1VniU-1Ky","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6730"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6732,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730\/revisions\/6732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}