The Other Karen

KIRKUS REVIEW

Comfy, feet-up romantic suspense in two postcard settings--rural Maine and wicked old Manhattan. Orphan Catherine Mayhew is barely surviving in the Big Apple, as a walk-on actress, when she answers a mysterious ad promising an out-of-town engagement and plenty of money. The catch? An old one. Catherine, you see, is a dead ringer for Karen, the long-disappeared granddaughter of elderly, ill Josephine Andexter--whose niece and nephew, artists Eunice and Brian, hire Catherine to impersonate Karen. . .just to make the old lady's last months happy. Hmmm. So ""Karen"" arrives at Pinehaven in Maine, soon adoring ""her"" grandmother--who is overjoyed, and seems to revive. But Catherine/Karen is puzzled by the hostility of housekeeper Mrs. Brill, certain townspeople, and blue-eyed Joel Cartwright--the real Karen's old lover. (Karen, it seems, was cold, callous, and devious.) Will the new Karen convince everyone that she's now a good person? Especially Joel? Or will the resident bad guys--who have more than one murder to their credit--get rid of Catherine/Karen before she and Joel can find the real Karen and expose all the nefarious doings? More Woolworth's than L.L. Bean, but tidier than some of Johnston's others--and very serviceable for the long, time following.