THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505200259
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PATRICIA A. ELLER
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
LET ME CALL YOU SWEETHEART
MARY HIGGINS CLARK
Simon & Schuster. 319 pp. $24.
MARY HIGGINS CLARK is queen of the bizarre and the Mother Superior of American suspense fiction.
Never mind that on bad days she sins against the commandment to ``show, not tell'' and stumps through her story on wooden prose. She's a reliable cash cow for her publisher; so it's small wonder that Clark's work is sacrosanct to her editors.
The latest thriller from this beloved icon and grand mistress of the artful coincidence unfolds in New Jersey, where heroine Kerry McGrath's ex-husband triggers a chain of fateful events when he injures their 10-year-old daughter in a traffic accident.
McGrath bundles the girl to a plastic surgeon and twice in the waiting room spots the same sculpted face on patients. The oddity nags at McGrath, an assistant county prosecutor, until she realizes the gorgeous clones are dead ringers for a victim in the ``Sweetheart Murder Case'' 11 years before.
McGrath digs out the dusty trial files and gets a shock. Her child's surgeon is the dead woman's father, whose vengeful testimony sealed his son-in-law's 30-years-without-parole prison sentence. Further strange discoveries cause McGrath to suspect irregularities in the closed case.
Meanwhile, McGrath is under consideration for a state judgeship. She wants it. She's earned it. But a close friend in politics hints she may lose the nomination if she reopens the old murder case.
Her ex-husband warns of more dangerous consequences, and he should know. He is longtime counsel to an indicted mafioso who is sweating the threat that a hireling may turn state's evidence on tax-evasion charges. The man might also offer damaging testimony about the mobster's old love affair with the murdered woman. This is big-league hard ball, and more murders occur while the author concocts a labyrinth of clues that implicate several more suspects in the original murder.
Let Me Call You Sweetheart is vintage Mary Higgins Clark, with plot twists honed over 20 years in more than a dozen books. In recent novels she has tackled such timely concerns as the potential danger in singles' personal ads and the peril in unethical fertility clinics.
But the mother lode Clark mines most often is the threat to an unsuspecting heroine when the bogeyman is someone she knows and trusts. Such treachery should horrify us, like random violence.
In Sweetheart, however, the prose is too plodding, the tension too slack and the climax too quick to give a genuine fright.
On the other hand, the news media provide such sobering doses of daily angst that perhaps Clark's reverent fans will find comforting escape in the tepid terror she dishes up here.
- MEMO: Patricia A. Eller is a writer who lives in Norfolk. by CNB