‘Just Take My Heart’ by Mary Higgins Clark

  I’ve never before read a book by Mary Higgins Clark. I know very little about her and her books, except for the fact that she has legions of fans. But after slogging through “Just Take My  Heart,” I’ll never attempt another.
  Because of my unfamiliarity with Clark’s oeuvre I don’t know if all of her books have the tone of a romance novel, but this one did. If you like romance novels that would be fine, but the book’s many implausibilities are not.
  We have here a heroine who’s an assistant district attorney, and of course she’s beautiful and always impeccably dressed, despite a predictably overloaded schedule that calls for frequent all-nighters. And of course her family members have all moved away and she doesn’t have any friends because of her schedule. But wait; there’s more: She’s the recent widow of a soldier who was fighting in Iraq, and — and — she recently had a heart transplant. She just happens to bear a striking resemblance to the famous actress who was the victim in a murder case she’s currently prosecuting. And her creepy next-door neighbor turns out to be — wait for it — a serial killer.
  Should I have inserted a spoiler alert for the last one? Nah, you should’ve seen that one coming, and anyway it’s revealed fairly early in the book. And I’ve refrained from mentioning four more twists near the end. Two are actually pretty decent, but the others are so unbelievable I startled others in my doctor’s waiting room with an incredulous (and vocal) “Oh, come ON.”
  I also noticed, as has been the case with other recently published books, a surprising number of typos, especially for a major publisher. Most were easy to skip over, but I found myself stuck by the use of “fun” when “fan” was intended.
  Clark’s had more than her share of best-sellers, but if the rest of them are anything like “Heart,” I sure don’t understand why.