Thank you Simon Books for my review copy! 

You Belong to Me 
By Mary Higgins Clark
Book 38 of 2024

Every once in a while, I like to dip into a backlist book, so when this one showed up on a Simon Book Influencer list that I could request, I recognized the author and thought it would be a fun one! 

I recognized Mary Higgins Clark for kind of a weird reason. In high school, I stumbled across her thriller “Loves Music, Loves to Dance,” and it was my first adult thriller and I absolutely loved it. Fast forward almost a decade, and I was on stage and had a scene where I got to read a book and it turned out to be the same one! I have absolutely no idea why my brain holds on to these details, but I was like – I NEED to read another one of her books. 

Well, being a couple decades older, and spending a lot of time reading for fun instead of for school like my younger self, how did this hold up? I think high school me would have still liked it, but the pace was off for present day me. 

You all know I read most of my books via audiobook, and saw this was on Spotify, so I was going to use some of my free hours to listen. However, I saw that it was an abridged version, and the audiobook was just broken up into three parts so I couldn’t easily go back and forth between my print copy and the audiobook, so I abandoned that idea. Why would a thriller need to be abridged anyway?

It turns out, it was probably abridged for good reason, since the pace from the 30%-90% mark was all over the place. It’s not that things weren’t happening, exactly, it was just very repetitive (I’ll put an explanation on goodreads with a spoiler tag).

I am not a huge mystery / thriller reader, and I tend to have a bit of a hard time keeping the clues straight, so I usually just enjoy the ride without guessing the ending. For this one, the suspects were a little too similar, so I was a bit frustrated with trying to keep it straight. 

I think to the modern thriller reader – this book will feel like a simmer. I really liked the main character and enjoyed watching her try to solve the mystery – meanwhile becoming more and more entangled with our suspects! I also liked that we got to see a lot of POVs – including the suspects. I thought it was interesting that we saw the killer’s perspective without being sure if it was one of our suspects or someone else as well. 

🎧 I didn’t end up choosing the abridged audiobook, but after reading it and listening to pieces of the audiobook, I think that would be a great way to read it!

[book synopsis]

“The mistress of high tension” ( The New Yorker ) and undisputed Queen of Suspense Mary Higgins Clark brings us another New York Times bestselling novel that USA TODAY calls “her page-turning best” about a killer who targets lonely women on cruise ships, a masterful combination of page-turning suspense and classic mystery.

When Dr. Susan Chandler decides to use her daily radio talk show to explore the phenomenon of women who disappear and are later found to have become victims of killers who prey on the lonely and insecure, she has no idea that she is exposing herself—and those closest to her—to the very terror that she hopes to warn others against.

Susan sets out to determine who is responsible for an attempt on the life of a woman who called in to the show offering information on the mysterious disappearance from a cruise ship, years before, of Regina Clausen, a wealthy investment advisor. Soon Susan finds herself in a race against time, for not only does the killer stalk these lonely women, but he seems intent on eliminating anyone who can possibly further Susan’s investigation.

As her search intensifies, Susan finds herself confronted with the realization that one of the men who have become important figures in her life might be the killer. And as she gets closer to uncovering his identity, she realizes almost too late that the hunter has become the hunted. Is she the next one marked for murder?