REMEMBER ME

Everything you'd expect from the reigning queen of prepubescent female suspense: A bereaved young mother battles demons from a recent mystery, from the distant past, and from her own fearful imaginings about the impending fate of her infant daughter. Two years after her son Bobby is killed in a collision with a train, children's author Menley Nichols, still haunted by anxiety attacks about Hannah, the daughter whose birth reunited her with her estranged lawyer husband, Adam, is vacationing with them in Remember House in the Cape Cod town of Chatham. What seems like a remake of Gaslight—Menley starts to hear Bobby calling to her, friends and neighbors report seeing her in places she doesn't remember being—heats up when Adam accepts an unseasonable client: Scott Covey, the penniless charmer accused of drowning his moneyed wife, Vivian, in a scuba accident. Chatham has already closed ranks against Scott, who evidently carried on a romance with main-chance local waitress Tina Aroldi till shortly before his own (very recent) wedding: Only Adam's old friend, realtor Elaine Atkins, and Scott's neighbor Henry Sprague back up his story of mutual devotion. As Adam chases leads that might help clear Scott, Menley, egged on by cryptic hints from Henry's Alzheimer-ravaged historian wife, Phoebe, immerses herself in another mystery: the riddle of why Mehitabel Freeman, for whom Remember House was first built 300 years before, went to her death denying the charge of adultery (though the other man in the case admitted it) that allowed her seafaring husband to take her own baby away. With such a tangle of villainous plots, you'd expect as many loose ends as in I'll Be Seeing You (1993). Miraculously, though, Clark, working like a steam engine, pulls everything together in a story that suits her gifts for compelling narrative (and her pulpish limitations) perfectly. Readers more interested in mystery than menace may well find this her best book yet. (Literary Guild main selection; author tour)