On the Street Where You Live

Mary Higgins Clark

I've read so many books by this author that they're somewhat predictable. I can often figure out the "bad guy(s)" from her writing style. Often she tells us at least one of the antoganists. The protagonist is a woman on her own, usually haunted by something. But formulaic or not, Clark still keeps me on the edge of my seat by the end of many of her novels.

This is true of On the Street Where You Live. Emily Graham is a lawyer who leaves Albany and moves to a small town in New Jersey. She bought the house that had been an ancestor's over 100 years earlier. There, her great-something aunt had been abducted as a young woman, not seen again. Two other young women disappeared over the next few years. Now, 100 years later, another young woman has disappeared, possibly two.

Now Emily is escaping the city of her ex-husband. She is also moving away from a man who was stalking her after she successfully defended another man that the first was certain had killed his mother. (Does that sentence make sense?) The stalker is now in jail.

Unfortunately, within the first two days or so, Emily's life gets thrown in a whirl again. First two bodies are found in her backyard while excavations are being done for a swimming pool. They are the bodies of her ancestor and the young woman who disappeared a couple years earlier. Then a picture is slipped under her door. Once again she is being stalked. Was the original stalker not caught? Yet there are pictures of the man breaking into her home. So perhaps there is a copy cat stalker?

This novel gets chilling. The antogonist is followed anonymously throughout the book through his first person narrated chapters. The reader knows immediately that he is a murderer, and why he starts killing. Later the reader learns he believes himself to be the reincarnation of the killer 100 years earlier. Following his thoughts off and on throughout the book help build the tension as the reader tries to identify him among the possible suspects in the novel.

Again, by the end of On the Street Where You Live, I was glued. Supposedly Emily is secure. Supposedly, the third serial victim has been killed. She doesn't realize her supposed friends aren't really. This may be typical Mary Higgins Clark style, but the story still works...and well.

Stillwatch by Mary Higgins Clark