Mary, Mary: A Novel - Hardcover

Parsons, Julie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684853248 ISBN 13: 9780684853246

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1999

Synopsis

Late on a hot Dublin night, Dr. Margaret Mitchell, a widow in her mid-forties, phones the police with a sense of dread and foreboding. Her daughter, Mary, went out with some friends twenty-four hours ago. She has not come home.
Two days later, Margaret receives an anonymous phone call. Having worked in an institution for the criminally insane, Margaret is all too familiar with what she hears on the other end of the line and it fills her with terror.
A week later an old man walking his dog beside a canal finds the body of Mary Mitchell half-submerged in the water. She has been raped, tortured, and beaten to death.
Inspector Michael McLoughlin, who has a reputation as a drinker and a womanizer, is assigned to the case. Although he was once a successful detective, there are now doubts about his stability. McLoughlin is taken with Margaret's beauty and the force of her personality: he becomes obsessed and watches her constantly.
The killer, meanwhile, has transferred his desire to damage and kill to Margaret, who finds herself drawn to the man who ruined her life and destroyed her daughter's.

About this title

Review:

When twenty year old Mary fails to come home one night, her mother Margaret knows something is wrong. Her persistent pleas to the police fall on deaf ears, until a mutilated body is discovered a week later. But the reader is already aware that Mary is dead, has heard her murderer tell her as he shaves her head that he is going to give her mother "a little puzzle to solve, to do with the word 'why'. Why I do what I do and why do I do it to you?" Understanding why becomes the issue at stake as Margaret is forced to confront the man who has so viciously overturned her life.

This debut novel depends on standard character and plot devices--a detective with a dying marriage, an alcohol problem and a growing affection for Margaret; and a conventional use of flashbacks to the past as a way of highlighting the emptiness of the present. Despite this, it is an unusually well-written thriller. Bringing the killer to justice is gradually eclipsed by the story of how Margaret deals with the brutal death of her only child, and the issues from her past she is forced to confront. If the prose seems a little forced at times (Parson's obsession with subtle detail sometimes fails to ring true), there is still plenty here for those who like their thrillers to be more than the just the good guys versus the bad. --Claire Allfree

Book Description:

'A psychological crime thriller which makes Patricia Cornwell read like Thomas the Tank Engine' Sunday Independent

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684853248
• ISBN 13: 9780684853246
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 299