The Lunch Table Girls Meet the Owl

I love getting lost in a good book. A story that can "take me away" for a few hours is worth its weight in gold to me. I do not like getting confused or agitated while reading. I should have stayed away from Mary Higgins Clark's Nighttime is My Time.

Being introduced to the main character, Jean Sheridan, is overshadowed by first reading about her former school mate being killed. Then we move to a 20 year old murder. Finally when Jean enters the picture she is regretting coming to her hometown. She has very few fond memories of growing up in Cornwell-on-Hudson. If it wasn't for the memorial for her friend she wouldn't have shown up for her high school's 20 year reunion where she, and others, are being honored.

Okay, with me so far? Because now is where I start to get agitated...Nighttime is My Time splits into several subplots while trying to maintain the original.

Jean starts searching for the daughter she gave up for adoption years ago due to threats she's being faxed about possible harm coming to the girl. I don't know about other fax machines, but ours at work puts the sending number on the page it prints. Seems like a pretty easy clue to locating at least the machine the faxes are coming from, yet it was never mentioned in the book.

A high school reporter, Jake, has pieced together what no one else has, including the police. In a span of twenty years the girls that sat at Jean's lunch table have died, in the order they sat at the table. Only two are left, Jean and Laura. When Laura goes missing at the reunion, the four male honorees and the reunion coordinator become suspects. All are given some type of personality flaw that makes them unlikable. With all of the obvious red herrings and interchangeable male characters, I got to the point I didn't care which one was the murderer...just arrest them all for being annoying.

Then Higgins Clark tosses in a budding relationship between the mother of the first girl murdered twenty years ago with the policeman who hasn't given up on trying to find the killer. Top it off with another start up relationship between Jean and one of the male honorees who may be threatening to kill her daughter and I become truly sorry that I ever started reading this book.

It is a mish mash of stories and characters that I could not get overly involved with. When the book revealed (several times) the reason the women had been killed was as girls they made fun of the boy, now a man, who stuttered a grade school play line, "I am the owl" all I could think of is "wow, he can hold a grudge".

I did not connect with any of the main or secondary characters. In fact a few of the male characters became irritatingly similar causing me to have to recheck who was who. While Higgens Clark did tie all of the stories together at the end, it was an unpleasant journey getting there. I did not get lost in this book, but this book has been "lost" in the garbage.