Mary Higgins Clark: Pretend You Don't See Her

Customer Reviews:

Some details escape the author's attention.......2007-07-17

The pattern of the previous films of this series by Ms Clark is partly broken. The main character is not a radio anchorwoman but a female real estate agent. We are not dealing here with a serial killer but with a real hit man hired by a dirty soiled trafficker who appears slightly ambiguous because his secular but not criminal boss, who he cheats, is Italian, or has some kind of an Italian name. But it does not have anything to do with the mafia. The whole business is a cover up operation for a first murder that the police sloppily classified as being an accident. There the pattern is not broken. The police is still sloppy. What's more the police does not succeed where a simple woman, by taking risks and using her intelligence, baits the hit man and the rotten egg out of the basket in which they were hiding. The suspense is OK though of course we know from the very start what the stakes are and we are only missing the name of the man who is ordering these murders. The police will arrive just on time when it is needed not to get into more complicated business. And yet the whole film is built around a leak in the police protection of the main character and we will never know how this leak happened and where it came from. The police is always sloppy with Ms Clark, but Ms Clark is also sloppy on some basic logical elements.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

Best of the Bunch.......2004-05-05

"Pretend You Don't See Her" is the best of the Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Movie adaptations. The openings are great fun -- with a rolling pastiche of "Red Shoe Diaries" cum mystery images (hee hee) and a glittering skyline, which sadly was missing from the latest installment in the series. In this film, Emma Samms plays a real estate agent who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery when her client's daughter is run over by a car and her client confides in her her belief that it was murder; then Samms ends up unwittingly witnessing the murder of the client and being entrusted with one of the biggest clues to the mystery -- the daughter's bloody journal pages. As a result, she is thrown into the witness protection program and is at great peril as the killer searches to find her. She also determines to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Samms gives a good performance in the lead, and the whole production is engaging and absorbing. There are plenty of red herrings, a good narrative, great pacing, and delicious close calls. I haven't read any of the Mary Higgins Clark novels, so I can't compare movie to book, but as a viewing experience, this one holds up well. It really is the best of the lot, thus far, and far ahead of the pack at that. I've watched it several times. (Next best in the series is "Lucky Day.") Highly recommended!

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