The Shadow of Your Smile by Mary Higgins Clark

Reviewed by Gerti

In “The Shadow of Your Smile”, bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark has written yet another suspenseful tale with interesting, characters – some likable, and some you love to hate. In the former category is the protagonist, Dr. Monica Farrell, who of course takes care of sick kids, but comes from a less than privileged background. Her father was adopted, and he never learned who his parents were, although he was the spitting image of his former boss (!), millionaire Alexander Gannon. The Gannon fortune is currently being squandered by Gannon’s nephews and other board members of the Gannon Foundation, so much so that they can no longer meet their grant commitments to the hospital where Monica works.

You can already see the direction the story is taking – Farrell will be related to Alexander Gannon, and the rightful heir to the fortune. But other interesting characters populate the story, like Olivia Morrow, an 82-year-old woman who knows the secret of Monica’s ancestry, but fails to act before she is killed. In fact, the plot is littered with bodies, many of whom Monica knows, like her former friend and stalker who also wants to tell her that he’s found out about her relationship to the Gannon family.

There is a vague religious aspect to this novel as well, with Monica witnessing a spontaneous cure of a child’s brain tumor that his family attributes to their praying to a nun the Catholic Church is considering making a saint. The religious woman, named Sister Catherine, was related to Olivia Morrow, so she’s conflicted about confessing to the world what she knows about Sister Catherine giving birth to a child. Yes, she got pregnant by Alexander Gannon, and they gave the baby away. All the pieces of the plot fit neatly into place, so neatly in fact that the book is pretty predictable.

The writing is still clever, the action-like scenes from a soap opera, with thwarted romance and police detectives lurking around each corner. I always love Clark’s writing, and do like that the outcome of the story is predictable to some extent, since it means that the trail was laid properly. What I don’t like is minor – we are lead to believe that one of the board members (and one of the nephews) is more evil than the other, but the reverse turns out to be true. So it turns out there is not one murderer, but several, and that is what I find implausible. If only one character had gone rogue to preserve their piece of the Gannon fortune, I would understand. But by the time several normally upstanding citizens are poisoning people and putting pillows on their faces, it just seems like science fiction rather than suspense.

“The Shadow of Your Smile” is a pleasant enough read if you don’t mind escapist literature. But I found the tale of a nun who had a baby and a cadre of high-society killers stretch the bounds of credibility. Still, I enjoyed reading it.