|
by: Mary Higgins Clark
Amazon.com's Price: $7.99 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780743497305
ISBN: 0743497309
Label: Pocket
Manufacturer: Pocket
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: February 26, 2008
Publisher: Pocket
Sales Rank: 6605
Studio: Pocket
Accessories:
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In a riveting psychological thriller, Mary Higgins Clark takes the reader deep into the mysteries of the human mind, where memories may be the most dangerous things of all.
At the center of her novel is Kay Lansing, who has grown up in Englewood, New Jersey, daughter of the landscaper to the wealthy and powerful Carrington family. Their mansion -- a historic seventeenth-century manor house transported stone by stone from Wales in 1848 -- has a hidden chapel. One day, accompanying her father to work, six-year-old Kay succumbs to curiosity and sneaks into the chapel. There, she overhears a quarrel between a man and a woman who is demanding money from him. When she says that this will be the last time, his caustic response is: 'I heard that song before.'
That same evening, the Carringtons hold a formal dinner dance after which Peter Carrington, a student at Princeton, drives home Susan Althorp, the eighteen-year-old daughter of neighbors. While her parents hear her come in, she is not in her room the next morning and is never seen or heard from again.
Throughout the years, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Peter Carrington. At age forty-two, head of the family business empire, he is still 'a person of interest' in the eyes of the police, not only for Susan Althorp's disappearance but also for the subsequent drowning death of his own pregnant wife in their swimming pool.
Kay Lansing, now living in New York and working as a librarian in Englewood, goes to see Peter Carrington to ask for permission to hold a cocktail party on his estate to benefit a literacy program, which he later grants. Kay comes to see Peter as maligned and misunderstood, and when he begins to court her after the cocktail party, she falls in love with him. Over the objections of her beloved grandmother Margaret O'Neil, who raised her after her parents' early deaths, she marries him. To her dismay, she soon finds that he is a sleepwalker whose nocturnal wanderings draw him to the spot at the pool where his wife met her end.
Susan Althorp's mother, Gladys, has always been convinced that Peter Carrington is responsible for her daughter's disappearance, a belief shared by many in the community. Disregarding her husband's protests about reopening the case, Gladys, now terminally ill, has hired a retired New York City detective to try to find out what happened to her daughter. Gladys wants to know before she dies.
Kay, too, has developed gnawing doubts about her husband. She believes that the key to the truth about his guilt or innocence lies in the scene she witnessed as a child in the chapel and knows she must learn the identity of the man and woman who quarreled there that day. Yet, she plunges into this pursuit realizing that 'that knowledge may not be enough to save my husband's life, if indeed it deserves to be saved.' What Kay does not even remotely suspect is that uncovering what lies behind these memories may cost her her own life.
I Heard That Song Before once again dramatically reconfirms Mary Higgins Clark's worldwide reputation as a master storyteller.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Everything You'd Expect from MHC :)
I am so glad that I bought this book, it is among MHC's best works, in my opinion.
The characters are likeable and the story made me second guess myself - I wanted Peter to be innocent, and Kay was convinced that he was but...how could he be? I was torn between guilt and innocence - of course I won't spoil the story for anyone who has yet to read it, though.
As usual for MHC the story was well written without explicit content and foul language, unlike so many other stories in the mystery ... Read More
Rating:  - Blech!
Mary Higgins Clark is a very well known name in the mystery/thriller category and one that I have never had occasion to read before. So, when I had the opportunity to pick up this book, I jumped at the chance of finding out how good she is and why she is such a top-selling author. I am very disappointed.
"I Heard That Song Before" starts out with a flashback from Kay Lansing who remembers visiting the Carrington mansion as a six year old, and being intrigued by rumors of an old English chapel, ... Read More
Rating: - Murder, She Wrote?
This book was suspenseful enough to keep me reading it. I've never read any MHC books before, so I'm not sure if they're written the same. The story was good, but the writing was off. It felt like she switched perspective too often (never quite sure who "I" is, for example.)
Rating:  - okay little mystery
Okay, I think that by now, all of us Mary Higgens Clark fans got the whole thing down by now: Some lady is pulled into some murder mystery usually involving some political or upperclass thing, nearly gets herself killed, falls in love, while at the same time being around a whole bunch of people which you can cross off the list one by one as they develop reasons for murdering someone. Still, she always gets them original, and doesn't dish off a whole bunch of cloned books. That's why I love her. Again, we're ... Read More
Rating:  - 3.5 Star Suspenseful Tale
I must first confess that this is the first novel I have read by famed author Mary Higgins Clark. While I thought this book was very good in the suspense department, the overall quality of writing was significantly lacking in my opinion (and to my surprise). Clark introduces an incredible number of "main characters" along the way in her tale of love, betrayal, and suspense. The number of characters is a bit unwieldy at times, mainly because her character development is quite poor. Dare I say, her character ... Read More
|
