Mary Higgins Clark, who’s now in her 80s, has been a successful author for decades, and has written at least two dozen mystery novels as well as several other books.   Her latest book is Just Take My Heart, and I will no doubt upset her myriad fans when I say that her latest book just doesn’t make the cut. 

It’s certainly readable, and in a sense you could say it’s a page-turner, because if you want to know what happens finally, you have to keep turning the pages.    But it was only because I was reviewing it for a local newspaper that I persevered.    My first attempt at it barely got me past chapter four.

It concerns an actor’s agent whose wife was murdered two and a half years ago.   At the time he was a prime suspect, but no conclusive evidence came to light.   A few chapters into the book we learn that a small time burglar now claims that the husband offered him money to murder his wife, and events move off from there.

The main female character is the Prosecutor in the subsequent trial.   She’s determined that the husband is the murderer.  

There’s also some nonsense about a heart transplant that has next to nothing to do with the story, and is introduced by two of the characters in an exposition scene that would disgrace a fledgling novelist.    Exposition is what minor characters used to do at the beginning of old-fashioned plays: they’d introduce the subject and personnel to the audience while apparently talking about something else. 

It’s usually regarded now as a bad way to begin a play, and it’s no better having it happen part way through a book, when it literally holds up the works.   In fact, in this story, characters often stop whatever they’re doing in order to tell us some piece of information that Clark thinks we need to know.   

When I say ‘characters’, however, I’m referring to the cardboard cut-outs the author has given names to.    They have about as much life as those characters who appear in the average episode of the average detective show on television.   And they talk in a way that lacks any real personality. 

In this book, there’s really no real hero or heroine to get emotionally involved with.  We skip back and forth between various characters, and even though Clark puts her prosecutor in a dangerous situation, we’re not much moved by this (as she isn’t much moved by the murder of the lady across the road from her.)

Nor are we much moved by the histrionics of the male lead: the defendant in the case.   He’s sloppily written and never settles down to being someone we can care about.

And then about half way through the book there’s a travesty of a trial.   The only thing real about it are the mechanics of what goes on in the average trial: the stuff that’s done on automatic pilot by the judge and clerks.

It’s not only a travesty of a trial in dramatic terms, it’s a travesty of justice.   If I were the defendant I’d never have taken on the two witless lawyers he’s saddled with.   They can’t even figure out problems that the reader has sussed out pages beforehand.   

With the main female character in the book being the prosecutor, someone who’s determined that the husband is the murderer (even though it’s plain to the most dim-witted reader that he isn’t) it’s very hard to get on her side – even when she finds she’s living next door to a serial killer.   This poor guy takes the lead in the sub-plot, such as it is, and gets nothing for his pains. 

In spite of all the murder mysteries I’ve read over the years, I’ve never been someone who could figure out who-dunnit, but in this book I even managed to do that.

One reviewer on Amazon.com says this: “I’m beginning to think someone else is writing the latest Mary Higgins Clark books. Bottom line, I loved her earlier works but the last few books she’s written have been dull. I thought it was boring and predictable–I figured out who the bad guy was within the first few chapters.”

Dull, boring and predictable.   Yes, that certainly sums it up.

Photo by Mark Coggins, Flickr.com