I've Got My Eyes on You

I've Got My Eyes on You is Mary Higgins Clark's 45th novel.  She has also co-authored 9 additional novels with 2 other people. This is a career total of 54 novels, quite the accomplishment.

The story opens with high school senior Kerry Dowling throwing a pool party for her high school graduating friends one night when she is home alone.  Kerry is dating Alan Crowley but was flirting all night with another boy Chris Kobel whom she will be going to Boston College with. She asks her guests to leave at 11 pm so she can clean up before her parents return the next morning.

Her next door neighbor, Jamie Chapman, watches the party from his bedroom window and comes over after he sees a man approach her with a golf club and then sees her entering the swimming pool. Kerry always invited Jamie to swim with her and Jamie does not understand why he was not invited to the party.

When Kerry parents return the next morning with her sister Aline they find her body floating in the pool.  The police are called and begin questioning every teen in attendance at the party in order to determine who her killer is.

The Queen of Suspense wrote another suspenseful novel here.  Each chapter ending pushed you to read the next chapter and the next and so on.  The author's choice of words made this easy reading.  I finished the book in one sitting.

There was some romance involved in the story that I felt was out of place.  Kerry's sister Aline began seeing the police investigator and a fellow teacher her first week back in town.  I cannot imagine any woman being interested in going out to eat with men she does not know right after a family member is killed.  That seemed odd to me. I would expect that a grieving sister would go straight home to her family after a day of work.

Aline was the amateur sleuth of the story, not the police investigator. That surprised me also. I  was expecting this book to be a detective story but the police detective used Aline to locate new information from the students who were in attendance at Kerry's party.  Aline began a new job as a guidance counselor at Kerry's high school the week after she was murdered and used the job to obtain information for the police.  I also thought that was odd, not something a normal person would risk doing.

Even with these anomalies, I've Got My Eyes on You was a great read which was just what I would expect from an author like Mary Higgins Clark.  She did not disappoint.

5 out of 5 stars!