As Time Goes By by Mary Higgins Clark

Reviewed by Gerti

It’s a sad thing for this fan to admit, but Mary Higgins Clark is old. She has been writing thrillers for a very long time! And although “As Time Goes By” is a thrilling story written in her usual vein, it has some inaccuracies and idiosyncracies that I can only attribute to Clark not being “with it” in the modern sense. She probably isn’t on Facebook or Instagram, and it’s that sort of thing that sinks a book for the modern reader who is more acquainted with those technological advances than is Clark. For example, I had a hard time listening to her discussing TV journalist Delaney Wright’s job because I had worked in the broadcasting and many aspects of TV reporting and anchoring were portrayed clumsily here, as though Clark had little experience of it.

Another false note for me was the character named Singh Patel. Those are two last names from the Indian subcontinent, and it seemed odd that a character would have two last names, the English equivalent of naming your child “Smith Jones”. Perhaps it happens, but it is odd enough to make me think that Clark doesn’t know any people of Indian or Pakistani descent, and therefore just picked these names because they sounded foreign to her. Since she didn’t catch the awkward name herself, an editor should have caught and changed it.

But now that I’ve revealed my pet peeves, on to the highly implausible plot – A beautiful widow named Betsy Grant is accused of having murdered her wealthy older husband, a famed local surgeon laid low by early-onset Alzheimer’s. Delaney Wright is supposed to cover the trial, but is suddenly promoted to evening anchor. However, since she’s so great at reporting, they don’t want to take her off the court beat. And yet the news stories that Wright delivers about the trial are anything but fair! Wright would get fired for biased reporting if she really filed the news stories as Clark writes them here!

As a side plot, Delaney is obsessed with finding her birth mother. She was adopted illegally, so it’s hard to research, but those loveable lottery winners, Alvirah and Willy Meehan, are around to do the work for her. And as luck would have it, the accused murderess is her birth mother! Delaney was conceived at senior prom (could it be any other way?) and the boy didn’t even know Betsy was pregnant! Delaney stops reporting on the trial again, as now she would really be biased! And in another clumsy plot twist, Betsy just reconnected with her old prom date – and Delaney’s birth father – before her husband died, and they are again in love. But that info sounds awful when revealed during the murder trial!

There are other possible suspects in the doctor’s death – the other doctor’s in his practice, his shiftless son who is deeply in debt, that sort of thing. But the real problem with ATGB is that there are so many different “important issues” fighting for center stage here, the drama gets lost. Too many implausible coincidences and not enough fact checking turns NYC into Fantasy Island in this Clark novel.