THE QUEEN OF ROMANTIC SUSPENSE WRiTES A GHOST STORY....
In an introduction to this novel, Mary Higgins Clark acknowledges reading several books of folk legends and history about Cape Cod and its outer islands near Boston, Massachusetts. REMEMBER ME (first published in 1994) is the result of her readings and introduces us to an authentic Captain's house on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean...an old house that is the object of a few local legends, filled with hidden rooms, once empty for 35 years. Around Cape Cod, the story is that a sea captain named Andrew Freeman built the house for his young bride in the late 1600s. Although the house was originally called Nickquenum, an Indian word that means "I am going home," the residents of nearby Chatham have dubbed it Remember House after a story about a woman who knew she was going to die when her baby was born and changed the name so the child would always remember her.
At the beginning of the story, Clark introduces us to Adam Nichols, a criminal attorney, and his wife Menley, a writer of children's stories, who live in Manhattan. Adam's family always summered at Cape Cod, so he rents the restored captain's house for a bit of rest and relaxation with his wife and their new baby daughter Hannah. Their first child, a son, had been killed in an accident a couple of years before the time of the story.
Mary Higgins Clark has always endeared readers with her romantic suspense and singular heroines. In this novel, she introduces a plethora of islanders...practically a whole village. There's Scott Covey who has married a wealthy spinster who drowns in an scuba accident off Monomoy Island shortly after the wedding. There's Phoebe Sprague and her husband Henry, a retired couple, who live next door to the Covey's. Phoebe was writing a history of the Cape but is in the throes of Alzeimer's. There's the widow Jan Paley whose husband died of a stroke incurred while restoring Remember House one hot summer day; she is presently leasing but thinking about selling the property. And there is Elaine Atlkins, a family friend and local realtor, who changes the location of the Nichols' vacation home at the last minute.
Although Clark inserts a cradle rocking by itself, sightings of a woman with baby on the widow's walk, and strange other events including a few mysterious sounds during the course of the story, Remember House, in the end, is just a dark, old house with a name...just a setting...no ghosts are found.