.
I Heard That Song Before by Mary Higgins Clark is about Kay Lansing who has grown up in Englewood, New Jersey, daughter
of the landscaper to the wealthy and powerful Carrington family. Their mansion - a historic seventeenth-century manor house transported stone by stone from Wales in 1848- has a hidden chapel. One day accompanying her father to work, six-year-old Kay sneaks into the chapel. There she overhears a quarrel between a man and a woman who is demanding money from him. When she says that this will be the last time, his caustic response is: "I heard that song before."
Later that evening, the Carrington''s hold a formal dinner dance after which Peter Carrington, a student at Princeton, takes Susan Althorp home, the eighteen-year old daughter of neighbors. Her parents hear her enter the house, but the next morning she is not in her room and is never seen or heard from again.
Through the years, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Peter Carrington. At age forty-two, head of the family business empire, he is still "a person of interest" in the eyes of the police, not only for Susan Althorp''s disappearance but also for the drowning death of his own pregnant wife in their swimming pool.
Kay Lansing is now living in New York and works as a librarian in Englewood asks Peter Carrington for persmission to hold a cocktail party on his estate to benefit a literary program. Peter grants her request. After the cocktail party, they begin to date and Kay falls in love with Peter. She marries Peter, but her beloved grandmother objects to her marriage to him.
Kay later finds out that her husband is a sleepwalker and his wanderings draw him to the spot at the pool where his wife met her end. Susan Althorp''s mother, Gladys reopens the case about her daughter''s disappearance now that she is terminally ill. She wants closure about her daughter''s death.
Kay has doubts, too, about her husband. She believes that the key to the truth about his guilt or innocense lies in the scene she witnessed as a six-year-old child in the chapel and knows she must learn the identity of the man and woman who quarreled there that day.
Published: August 06, 2007
More in Mystery & Thrillers
More summaries by Brity10
More