FICTION/MURDER MYSTERY
All By Myself, Alone
Mary Higgins Clark
Published: 2017
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Language: English
Pages: 321, paperback
When you have read too many thrillers, you begin to understand how writers of the genre tend to think and, as a result, you can sort of figure out (with 100 percent accuracy, 99 percent of the times) who the killer is after reading about a 100 pages. And that sucks. That’s when you turn to Mary Higgins Clark. Reading her is perhaps that one percent of time you can’t make a correct guess. And that more than makes up for all the times you picked up a murder mystery and shoved it back in the bookshelf halfway through, disappointed by the writer and vowing to give up on the genre altogether. The thing with Mary Higgins Clark is that she tells you a story where every character comes to life. She’s not just trying to thrill you with moments and incidents, though there will be plenty of that too.
Take for instance ‘All By Myself, Alone’, where she brings back two of her characters Alvirah and Willy Meehan, last seen in 2016’s ‘As Time Goes By’. Here it almost feels like they continue where they left off as they celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary by taking a luxury cruise aboard the Queen Charlotte, which is making its maiden voyage from New York, USA, to Southampton, England. In a myriad of characters and their own stories, Clark then injects theft and murder.
Lovers of Agatha Christie can rejoice because reading this latest installment by Clark will bring back fond memories of those days when reading Christie was an unmatched pleasure. The plot feels somewhat similar to Christie’s 1934 masterpiece, ‘Murder on Orient Express’, featuring the Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, which was recently adapted for the big screen as well. But the sense of familiarity is because of the fact that Christie’s novel took place on a train and Clark’s tale of suspense unfolds aboard a ship.
The language is simple and the chapters short. And though Clark simply lets the plot play out till the culprit makes a mistake and gets caught—unlike in her previous works where each suspect would be put under the spyglass, interrogated, and then carefully dismissed—the intrigue quotient is still high in All By Myself, Alone, and Clark, now 90, proves once again that she’s at the top of her game.
