I Heard That Song Before, Mary Higgins Clark
23 Rating(s)
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I Heard That Song Before

Narrator: Jan Maxwell

Abridged: 4 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/01/2008


Synopsis

In a riveting psychological thriller, Mary Higgins Clark takes the reader deep into the mysteries of the human mind, where memories may be the most dangerous things of all.

Kay Lansing, who has grown up in Englewood, New Jersey, is the daughter of the landscaper to the wealthy and powerful Carrington family. Their mansion—a historic seventeenth-century manor house transported stone by stone from Wales in 1848—has a hidden chapel. One day, accompanying her father to work, six-year-old Kay succumbs to curiosity and sneaks into the chapel. There, she overhears a quarrel between a man and a woman who is demanding money from him. When she says that this will be the last time, his caustic response is: "I heard that song before."

That same evening, the Carringtons hold a formal dinner dance after which Peter Carrington, a student at Princeton, drives home Susan Althorp, the eighteen-year-old daughter of neighbors. While her parents hear her come in, she is not in her room the next morning and is never seen or heard from again.

Throughout the years, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Peter Carrington. At age forty-two, head of the family business empire, he is still "a person of interest" in the eyes of the police, not only for Susan Althorp's disappearance but also for the subsequent drowning death of his own pregnant wife in their swimming pool.

Kay Lansing, now living in New York and working as a librarian in Englewood, goes to see Peter Carrington to ask for permission to hold a cocktail party on his estate to benefit a literacy program, which he later grants. Kay comes to see Peter as maligned and misunderstood, and when he begins to court her after the cocktail party, she falls in love with him. Over the objections of her beloved grandmother, who raised her after her parents' early deaths, she marries him. To her dismay, she soon finds that he is a sleepwalker whose nocturnal wanderings draw him to the spot at the pool where his wife met her end.

Kay develops gnawing doubts about her husband. She believes that the key to the truth about his guilt or innocence lies in the scene she witnessed as a child in the chapel and knows she must learn the identity of the man and woman who quarreled there that day. What Kay does not even remotely suspect is that uncovering what lies behind these memories may cost her her own life.

I Heard That Song Before once again dramatically reconfirms Mary Higgins Clark's worldwide reputation as a master storyteller.

Author Bio

Suspense author, Mary Higgins Clark has had 51 novels that have been bestsellers in the United States and many other countries, all of which remain in print through 2015. It was through necessity that her career blossomed, but she had always had writing talent and aspirations.

Clark followed a dream in her early career and took time out to be a(at that time) stewardess for PanAm so she could see the world. Just before beginning her exciting new job.....being paid $5 less per week than her secretarial job.......she met William Clark who was so smitten with her that he proposed that she stay in the job for one year, then marry him at the end of that year. And they did just that. The Clarks had five children, and sadly her husband passed away from an extended bout of heart problems in 1964. Also, very sadly, his mother was at his bedside when he died, and she too passed away that very same night.

So, as stated before, out of necessity, Higgins Clark seriously launched her career of writing 51suspense novels with some being adapted to film. She is known as the "Queen of Suspense", she has the ability to serve as a master plotter to slowly create tension for the reader, while giving the appearance that everyone is guilty. Her books feature strong, independent women characters who are the heroines, who are noted for making sensible decisions. Readers tend to identify with these characters as more ordinary people than most novel heroines. Higgins Carter's novels are for adult readers, but because she does not include explicit sex or violence in them, they are also popular with children as young as twelve. Simon & Schuster have published all of Higgins Clark's novels, signed her to a $64 million , four book contract in 1990, and have funded the Mary Higgins Clark Award given to new authors of suspense novels.

Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Laura on 2008-08-13 18:48:07

This was an ok book. I think it could have been cut shorter!!

AudiobooksNow review by Stacey on 2009-04-05 06:44:58

Kind of boring. Usually Clark is a quick read for me, but this one is no page-turner.

AudiobooksNow review by Loretta on 2010-05-06 13:41:19

This author is one of my favorites, and I've listened to this book twice.

AudiobooksNow review by Rifka on 2015-08-29 21:34:13

Excellent. Wonderful characters, good suspense, although pretty easy to figure out whodunit! But getting there was very enjoyable.