Same again but I suppose it works

No Place Like Home, by Mary Higgins Clark (HarperCollins, $21.99):

Author Mary Higgins Clark has added yet another bestseller to her seemingly endless list with this story about, once again, a secret from the past that doesn’t want to stay in the past.

A little girl wakes in the night to hear her mother struggling with her stepfather. She takes her late father’s gun from a drawer and tries to protect her mother but it all goes horribly wrong, leaving her mother dead, her stepfather wounded and the girl herself facing a charge of murder.

Years later and the little girl is all grown up with a new name (Celia) and a new husband who she hasn’t told about her troubled past.

He decides to surprise her for her birthday by buying what he believes is the perfect home. And it would be … it’s everything she was looking for in a home — apart from the fact that it’s the site of the shooting.

Moving in brings all the memories rushing back for not just Celia but others involved in the original case.

Celia believes she’s successfully rebuilt her life and that no one knows who she is but a brutal murder makes it obvious that someone knows her secret.

For the most part I enjoyed this book, I just wish the whole “secret from the past” scenario wasn’t the backbone of yet another story.

The characters are always well-rounded and the intrigue suitably mysterious but that one plot line seems to be repeated in far too many of these books.

However, I suppose it says something for the author’s skills when, even though I’m grumbling about an oft-repeated plot “twist”, I still enjoyed the end result.

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