Before I Say Good-Bye by Mary Higgins Clark

Reviewed by Gerti

Mary Higgins Clark’s novel “Before I Say Good-Bye” is about a woman with more psychic powers than sense. Protagonist Cornelia (Nell) MacDermott has spent her life hearing from the dead. Her parents came to visit her after they had died in a tragic place crash. Also during her childhood, she sensed that her grandmother came to see her after she passed. But her grandfather, who raised her after those deaths, is skeptical about this whole psychic thing, and since Mac is a blustery but powerful New York politician, Nell generally plays along with him. That is, until her husband is killed in a boating tragedy, and she is left wondering why she can’t “sense” his presence. Mac wants her to leave it alone since he hopes Nell will run for his congressional seat. But Nell is wracked with guilt because of a fight she had with her husband before he left on that boat trip.

Fortunately for Nell, she has a great aunt named Gert who not only believes in psychics, she consorts with people with extra-sensory perception. She convinces her niece to see a medium who says she’s received a message from Adam Cauliff, Nell’s husband. He was an architect and, using money he borrowed from Nell’s trust fund, he had purchased a NYC property that is just about to pay big dividends. Adam was going to design the new building for that spot, and build it along with primo Manhattan real-estate developer Peter Lang.

But Bonnie the medium tells Nell that she sees Peter Lang dripping with blood, and Nell wonders if he wasn’t the man behind her husband’s boat accident. Lang was supposed to be on board the vessel that day, meeting with a number of other developers, but Lang got into an accident on the way there, and never made the meeting. Clark wants us to believe this is highly suspicious.

She also throws a number of other suspects our way – the son of the woman who sold the property, who not only has a long criminal history, but thinks Adam paid his mom less than she deserved for the piece of land. Then of course there’s the firm where Adam used to work, which is being investigated for bid rigging. Did Adam know more than they wanted revealed about their dirty dealings? And then there’s Adam’s secretary, whom he took with him when he left the previous architectural firm. She knew all about their business, too. She was also on the boat, so maybe she was the intended target of the explosion? There are other people on the suspect list, too, and Clark even goes into the lives of the cops who are investigating the explosion. And then there’s the kid who saw the boat blow up from a tourist craft nearby.

In the end, we find that the psychic was in co-hoots with the husband, who isn’t dead at all, but who was also stringing along his mousey secretary, who was in love with him, in order to make a mint of money. My critique - sometimes Clark loves writing so much that she writes too much. For me, “Before I Say Good-Bye” is one story where fewer characters might have made it more suspenseful.