…and it was awful.
1 Pretzel
Listen, I decided to give Mary Higgins Clark, the queen of suspense, a shot. Oh, boy. I don’t know if I picked the wrong book, or what, but it was – how to politely say this – hot garbage.
Reincarnation, two serial killers, stalkers, a madman who maybe killed his mother.
On the Street Where You Live has ALL of these things and is somehow boring as hell.
A Synopsis in Brief:
Emily Graham, accomplished defense attorney working in New York, has decided to buy her ancestral home in Spring Lake, New Jersey. It’s a huge Victorian, and we soon find out that, about a hundred years ago, Emily’s Great Aunt Madeline went missing. Her body was never found. Weirdly enough, a young lady from Spring Lake has recently gone missing.
When landscapers discover a body on Emily’s property, everyone is shook. Rightfully so. The body is that of the woman who had recently gone missing. When she’s examined, they discover she’s holding an old ass finger bone in her hand. Could it be Madeline’s? It sure as heck could! And it is! How is this book boring? Well, let me tell ya’.
About seventy percent of this book is Emily’s internal thoughts. And Emily is a naive moron. The thirty percent that isn’t Emily’s idiotic thoughts is broken up as follows:
12% dialogue
7% prose
11% other people’s internal dialogue
And, boy, are there a lot of people.
On the Street Where You Live has a cast of roughly 1000 and 85% of them do not matter. For example, Emily meets, like, six old people who were friends with her great aunt. They each give her bits and pieces of information that she then has to piece together. All while being stalked and dodging dude after dude. Because that’s a thing, too. She had a stalker in NY. She has one in NJ. Are they the same person? Who cares? Also, everyone wants to get with Emily. Having been inside her head, these men’s attraction to her is the real mystery.
So, Emily, with the help of a creepy historian dude, digs into the past. One hundred and ten years ago, three young women were murdered, one of them being Madeline. In present day, two women have disappeared and the date of the third past disappearance is approaching. With this new info, Emily develops a theory about what happened to Madeline. She’s wrong, but I applaud her efforts.
Meanwhile, we are introduced to a psychologist who believers in reincarnation; we are also introduced to her assistant, several of her colleagues, her dog, her best play cousin, and her former neighbor’s ex-wife. The doc believes in reincarnation to the point that she gives formal lectures on the subject. But then she gets killed.
We are also introduced to a tabloid reporter who attended the last lecture the reincarnation specialist gave before her murder. She makes a beeline for Spring Valley where she interviews a old woman. Who gets murdered.
Okay, so, with all this murder, stalking, and general creep ass behavior, this book should be right up my alley. At its core, it’s a cool story; it just gets so bogged down by extra characters who aren’t developed enough to even be stand out characters. The reader spends far too much time thinking, “Is this the failed restaurant owner, or the disgraced professor who banged his student?” And does it matter? No, not really. Because neither of those guys are the killer, the stalker, the special man friend. They are red herrings. So is literally every man introduced in this story. The reader is dodging red herrings like crazy. Red herring, pickled herring, striped herring. They’re all there. I know almost nothing about fish, striped herring may not even be a thing, but you get my point. By the time the stalker(s) and killer(s) are revealed, I didn’t care and just wanted to take a nap.
This book was borderline terrible, and I expected more from the queen of suspense. Will I give her another shot? Absolutely. But not anytime soon.
Okay, byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Smoky Lynx
Holland + Harper Productions 