We'll Meet Again is filled with the ingredients that Mary Higgins Clark devotees will devour: fast-paced suspense, double-crossing villains, romantic intrigue, and a resounding showdown at the end. Harder to swallow is the excessive use of theatricals whenever the author describes a satanic like HMO, and its legion of evil doctors. The darkest knight of all is Peter Black, whose eyes "were cold, angry, menacing--certainly not the eyes of a healer." Still, melodrama aside, Higgins Clark still knows how to spin a good yarn.
Her heroine in We'll Meet Again is an investigative reporter named Fran Simmons, who is not unlike the bright, resourceful Dr. Susan Chandler in You Belong to Me. Fran has just been hired to work on a popular new TV show called True Crime. Coincidentally, her very first assignment involves an ex-pupil from her old high school, the posh Cranden Academy in Greenwich, Connecticut. Molly Lasch had been incarcerated in her mid-20s, accused of pulverizing her husband's head with a Remington bronze sculpture. The murder of this community doctor, and chief executive officer of a local HMO, stunned Greenwich.
For half a decade Molly claimed to have no memory of the event, but now out on parole, slivers of memory trickle back--and Molly informs the press that someone else was in the house at the time of her husband's murder. Few people believe her--even less so when a key witness from the original trial is stabbed to death and evidence links Molly to the scene of the crime. It's up to the ever vigilant Fran to investigate what the police won't--and she unearths some very dark and extremely dirty secrets that will further shock the quiet community. --Naomi Gesinger
