Nighttime is My Time

Wow! I just finished Nighttime is My Time and it's a terrific mystery. So many possible villains: Gordon Amory, Jack Emerson, Carter Stewart, Mark Fleischman, and those are just the obvious ones. The plot has to do with a high school reunion and its attendant honoring of some of the class's most successful graduates. There are six of them. The four men mentioned above and two women, actress Laura Wilcox and Dr. Jean Sheridan, historian and best selling author. All of the guys had rough lives as youngsters and a couple of them intensely hated Stonecroft Academy and everyone in it. However, one of them hated seven girls in particular. One of those, Alison Kendall, drowned in her pool only a short time before the reunion and everyone is abuzz about that as the weekend festivities begin.

On another front, Cornwall Police Detective Sam Deegan is still trying to solve the twenty-year-old murder of another young woman in town, Karen Sommers, and soon finds himself up to his earlobes in more murders, similar in method to Karen's. Stonecroft Gazette reporter extraordinaire, Jake Perkins, is on the scene to record reunion events, and ends up a major player as people begin to go missing.

Ms. Clark has woven her tale very carefully, presenting the reader with a red herring here and there, and in general making one's skin crawl as the plot unfolds. The evil one is an active character in the story in the form of his real persona and his alter ego. Clark conceals the killer's identity from the reader, until she's ready to expose him, by using his alter ego's moniker, The Owl, and having him forbid his victims to speak...even think, it appears...his real name.

A piece of advice for high school students reading this book: Be careful how you treat your fellow classmates, particularly at the lunch table.