The Melody Lingers Onby Mary Higgins ClarkSimon & Schuster, 2015Simon & Schuster hits on a winning little publicity gimmick when promoting The Melody Lingers On, the latest thriller from one of the house's most reliable writers, Mary Higgins Clark: the folks at S&S remind their readers that 2015 marks the 40th anniversary of the appearance of Higgins' debut thriller Where Are the Children?, and they point out that 2015 will also see the publication of Clark's short story collection Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Stories and the novel All Dressed in White, co-written with her collaborator Alafair Burke. A book-publicist would hardly be worthy of her cubicle if she couldn't take those facts, put them together, and call the whole thing “The Year of Mary.” And so it is, and Clark's many, many fans will smile to think of this author being regaled for the year.As anyone who's ever met her on book-tour will attest, Mary Higgins Clark is a wonderful person – approachable, funny, tart, and such a natural raconteur that she can turn the simplest incident into a story sharply geared to get any listener to ask “what happens next?” She's retained her croaking Bronx accent throughout her life, she handles her stories with a no-nonsense mechanic's tool chest, and as with most first-rate dramatists, she understands the zinger on a molecular level. A “Year of Mary” will of necessity be a year that celebrates dozens of crackerjack popular thrillers.The latest of those thrillers is The Melody Lingers On, in which Elaine “Lane” Harmon, a thirty-year-old widow and mother who's the assistant to combative old Glady Harper, “the doyenne of interior decorating among the wealthy and the socially ambitious.” Lane is a classic Higgins Clark heroine: she's been battered a bit by life (her husband was killed by a drunk driver while she herself was pregnant with her daughter Katie) but is also upbeat by nature – in this case, a perfect foil for crusty old Glady Harper, who's got a new commission she wants to discuss with Lane as the novel opens.The commission involves an explosive name: Parker Bennett, scandalous billionaire investment scammer who bilked hundreds of duped investors and then, one step ahead of the law, boarded his yacht and disappeared, rumored either to be a suicide or a fugitive. In Bennett's salad days, Glady Harper had charged him a king's ransom to fit out his enormous, gaudy mansion in Greenwich. And now that he's gone and the authorities have confiscated as much of his estate as they legally can, the financier's wife Anne and his son Eric want Glady's help picking over the house's remaining items in order to furnish the new condo where Anne Bennett will move now that the big house has been sold. Glady takes Lane along to help with the process, reminiscing along the way about her association with the infamous swindler:
It was when they made the turn at the exit that Glady said, “I remember when I first came up here. Parker Bennett had bought that enormous house. The man who built it went broke before he could move in. The way it was designed it was the quintessence of bad taste. I brought in an architect, and between us we remodeled the interior. My God, they had a counter shaped like a sarcophagus in the kitchen. In the dining room they had painted their version of the Sistine Chapel. It was an insult to Michelangelo.”
Any reader of Mary Higgins Clark novels will read a set-up like this and feel their feet on very familiar ground. Those readers will know a brace of things right up front: Lane will like what she sees when she looks at Eric; Anne Bennett will prove herself to be steely and noble; wily Parker Bennett will very quickly show up alive and well and devious but not entirely unlikable; and all the characters will confront unexpected dangers in the territory between life and the law. The novel's FBI agents are leanly but grippingly written, and although Lane and Eric do the running around and being-in-peril that all thrillers require, the real scene-stealer in the book is Glady Harper, grousing and holding forth at almost every stage of the plot.That plot is energetic and has many moving parts well orchestrated, and if it at times feels a bit thinner than some of the novels that first made Mary Higgins Clark one of the bestselling authors in American history, it might be worth remembering that the “Year of Mary” would tax the wherewithal of an author significantly younger than this one, who's very nearly 90 and still writes books that positively invite curling up.
