Nighttime Is My Time by Mary Higgins Clark

Review by Gerti

Mary Higgins Clark has written a large number of books very well. However, this novel, “Nighttime Is My Time,” is not one of them.

It tells the story of protagonist Jean Sheridan who is called back to her hometown of Cornwall-on-Hudson in New York for a class reunion. She is one of the famous alum’s from Stonecroft Academy, and is therefore one of those being specially honored by that school during the reunion. Unfortunately, many of the girls she used to sit with at her lunch table have since died, and that’s pretty unusual.

It takes a long time for players in this story to realize that a killer called “The Owl” is on the prowl. He is on a mission of revenge against the girls who used to laugh at him in school (predictable), and no amount of money or success after high school can lure him away from the madness of murder. The problem is, the evidence points to one of the honorees being the killer, but which one is it? Mark Fleischman, Gordon Amory, Robby Brent, Jack Emerson, or Carter “Howie” Stewart? The author leads you on a wild dance of red herrings as she makes each of them look guilty. And then you have to learn the names of the five murdered girls and their back stories, and where they ran into the killer again… and then you’re introduced to other non-Stonecroft victims, because the killer has knocked off other vulnerable women besides those from the school during his career because he just likes killing. It all gets to be TMI – too much information.

While I liked the premise and the story Clark weaves, the cast of characters here was just too huge for me. Her writing is always a pleasure to read, and I liked protagonist Jean, but there were just too many suspects to keep everybody straight. I am a huge fan of MHC, but I read her books for relaxation. I don’t want to treat them like college assignments, taking notes about the character’s different backgrounds or putting together a flowchart to figure out how everyone is related, and that is what I’d have to do here with NIMT to keep things straight. I simply want to be entertained when I read Clark’s novels, and this mystery, clever as it is, requires too much heavy lifting for me to follow along easily. I’d skip this one, Clark fans.