It's a bit more boring than the first one I read, but this is because the same things get repeated again and again. It sort of has two parallel stories: 1)Nick Spencer, a man who has convinced a lot of people that he would have found a cure for cancer, disappears after his plane crashes. After that, a big loss of money is discovered in his company, and also that the cure is a fraud, and he is accused of having stolen the money of all those people who invested all their money because they believed in him, and also of breaking every hope people had in that cure. Is he really dead? Did he really steal those money? Did he always know the cure didn't work?
2) Ned also put all his money into Nick's company, but he did it by selling his country house without asking his wife Annie's opinion, because he knew she would have never accepted. Annie loved that house very much, it was the joy of her life, and she was so very hurt, one day she drove into the street too carelessly, had a bad accident and died. Now Ned blames everyone but himself for her death, and without her to remind him every day he stopped taking his meds. Now he's on a frenzy, set fire to Nick's house almost killing his wife (widow) Lynn, then he starts killing other people.
I mean, the stories are certainly linked, but they have two different plot-lines because Ned's story is known, while the truth about Nick is a mystery.
We follow Marcia "Carly" De Carlo, a journalist who's going to write the story. She's also Lynn's step-sister, but it's not her fault :-p her mother married Lynn's father.
She also invested her savings into the company, and always thought of Nick as a good person. Now she investigates to write a good article along with two other journalists, Ken Page and Don Carter. During her investigation she goes back and forth to speak with everyone can have any bit of useful information, then thinks it over and also talks about her findings with Ken and Don. This is the boring bit, I guess, because people tell her things and she thinks it over, joining this and that bit together than she tells it all to her collegues... well, I 'heard' it the first time, and all the others are repetitions. MHC should have done what has always been done under this circumstances: a simple line saying "she told them about her conversation with" and stop. Of course the book would have been a little shorter, but much much better. A lot of pages is not always a good thing in itself. Personally I'll never buy it.
That's the only problem, otherwise the investigation is well done. I'll say now how the two stories go:
Ned is clearly out of his mind, he even talks out loud with his dead wife. He kills his house-owner Mrs Morgan because now that he didn't have dear sweet Annie to take care of him, Mrs Morgan didn't want him around anymore. She had liked Annie but not Ned, he scared her. Then he kills Mr Harnik because he offered to buy the famous house, probably because he didn't want Ned as a neighbor. He kills Mrs Harnik too: she had wanted to call Annie to ask her if she was alright in selling her precious house, but then had not called. He kills the neighbor Mrs Schafley because she always said how much she liked Annie but then she wanted so much to get rid of Ned that never warned Annie that her husband wanted to sell her house. He kills Peg because when he went to buy some stuff at the shop where she worked, she noticed his hand was so badly burned. He also plans to kill Lynn and Carly before killing himself. He will actually come in time to 'save' Carly when a man is about to kill her. He kills the man and Lynn and forces Carly to drive him to the cemetery where Annie is buried.
Nick's story: During her investigation Carly learns that the cure had worked at least once, that Nick would not have run away leaving his son and the girl he was probably in love with here; that someone stole Nick's father's old notes, very important for the research. That a doctor is run-over by a car after talking to Carly. Could he recognize the 'thief'?? That Vivien, Nick's secretary, and probably in love with him, disappeared and was found after five days in a confused state of mind, not remembering anything that happened after she was sixteen.
After seeing how a lawyer used to dye his hair Carly realizes (almost) everything, and what she didn't guess will be revealed to her by Lynn. A powerful, icy man, Mr Garner, instead of buying the cure from Nick had decided to take it all for nothing. With the help of other people he falsified documents to make it look like the cure didn't work, while a man in Nick's company stole all that money.
Garner and Lynn were lovers (this was pretty much obvious to me). She drugged Nick before he went off piloting his plane, thus being responsible for his death. Now lawyer Drexel is about to shoot Carly while Lynn stays to watch without emotions, when Ned enters the house and shoots Drexel first and then Lynn. Carly is scared to death and tries to talk to Ned, hoping he won't kill her. When her about-to-be-boyfriend Casey calls her, she tells him she's "happy she's going to meet Patrick" (Patrick was the name of her dead child), so he understands something's wrong and calls the police, who understand Ned's going to Annie's grave and wait there for him. It's not too clear to me if Ned spared her or if the police shot him, because Carly faints. When she realizes she's alive she thinks Ned spared her, but then we're told that the police were watching the cemetery, sure Ned would return to Annie's grave, and immediately ran when whey received the call, so it could be either way.
The book ends restoring Nick's name and reputation. He had never stolen money, never lied to gain more investors, never took advantage of poor people's hope of curing their loved ones. He had lost his first wife to cancer, and hated the damn thing.
I didn't find the revelation of Lynn's lover's name a surprise. Carly was indeed surprised, but it's not as easy to trick the reader :-)
There's also the fact that icy-man and icy-woman were made for each other.
Cutting a little here and there, this again could be a great movie; I wonder they've never made movies out of Mary Higgins Clark's books? Why? I don't know, they seem very good plots to me. And well written, although I liked the other one more.
ITA la seconda volta
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