A Stranger is Watching by Mary Higgins Clark 3.5 out of 10 ⭐

February 26, 2025

A Stranger is Watching by Mary Higgins Clark 3.5 out of 10 ⭐

A Stranger is Watching by Mary Higgins Clark

3.5 out of 10 stars Time to read 2:37

PLOT:

A Stranger is Watching is a tepid book about a serial killer (who's not at all scary), named Foxy (WTH?). He kills several women, including Nina Peterson, the wife and mother of a small boy. Neil, the boy, inadvertently sees the killing of his mother, and sends 19 year old, Ronald Thompson to prison for a crime he didn't commit. After the conviction, Steve Peterson, Neil's father begins to heal, and goes on talk shows espousing his pro views on capital punishment. He meets Sharon Martin, an activist against executions, and they strike up a relationship. (It is the lamest, saddest attempt at a romantic encounter I've ever read). There's no romance between the couple, Sharon seems indifferent to Steve, even when Clark tries to make her need him. There's eventually a kidnapping, a bomb, and an epic failure in place of a suspenseful crescendo.

REVIEW:

Mary Higgins Clark is pure pulp fiction "books about imaginary characters and events, produced in large quantities and intended to be read by many people but not considered to be of very good quality", that describes Clark to a tee. Her writing is good enough for light reading, better than some, worse than others, she does paint a picture of places, people and things.

But the real problem I have with Clark is her two dimensional characters. If you read her books back to back, you begin to see the same characters appear again and again. That can happen to anyone, even Stephen King said he had problems with this, but a decent author should at least try to avoid it. Clark seems to deliberately use her previous character studies, and then she just changes the small details, like names and appearance.

Clark is actually better at creating atmospherics, and I wish she'd focused on that more in her career. Her best book (IMHO) is A Cry in the Night, and it's because the farm, and surrounding area becomes a character, the most interesting one, and carries the book forward. The characters are slaves to it, it feeds on them in a way, becoming a monster in it's own right. That doesn't happen here, although Clark tries with the dank room the kidnapped couple are held in.

I think Clark's main problem is not understanding the true evil of men. She has no comprehension of what constitutes a real fiendish degenerate, who at his core lies a cacophony of disturbed voices and vile fantasies, that can lead to his striking out at the vulnerable just to ease his sick tensions. And so she fails to scare us, because her descriptions of these men becomes farcical, instead of realistic. They become instead like a paper doll, flat, two dimensional, and with no ability to hurt or frighten us. I mean for God's sake, she named her serial killer "Foxy"!

This leads me to my next problem with all of Clark's books, the women are always victims. They never try to help themselves, they expect a man to come to their rescue. It's pitiful and disgusting, and I expect more from female writers. I know, these books are written, and take place in the 1970's-1980's, but there were strong women then. In this book, Clark tries to pass Sharon Martin off as a hard nosed writer, who travels to dangerous places, chasing stories. But it's just window dressing, and when the chips are down, Sharon actually says to herself, "What was he going to do to me?" She never considers fighting back, she never asks herself, "What am I going to do to him?" She doesn't try to save herself (her attempts are lackluster and pathetic), she simply puts her fate in everyone else's hands. I don't believe both things are true. Either Sharon is a badass, traveling to war zones to get her stories, or she's a sniveling simp. You can't have it both ways.

I've heard lots of Clark's books have been made into tv movies, and I think she would have been more successful writing screenplays. Her stories seem to be made for the small screen, but always fall flat in book form. I'll probably read more of these to fall asleep, that's what they seem to be written for.