Stillwatch was published by Simon & Schuster in 1984, continuing Clark’s exploration of women whose present safety is threatened by buried pasts. The novel is set in Washington, D.C., and uses the political world — ambition, image management, the gap between public persona and private reality — as the backdrop for a thriller about memory, identity, and the impossibility of escaping childhood trauma.
Pat Traymore is a successful television journalist who returns to Washington to produce a documentary about Senator Abigail Jennings, who is being considered for the Vice Presidential nomination. Pat rents a Georgetown house for the project — and discovers, with mounting horror, that it is the house where she lived as a child, the house where her father killed her mother and attempted to kill her before being shot by police. She has blocked these memories; the house brings them back.
The dual investigation — Pat’s research into Senator Jennings’s past (which reveals secrets that could destroy the nomination) and her growing awareness of her own buried history — creates a structure where political thriller and psychological suspense reinforce each other. Someone is watching Pat; someone knows what happened in that house; and someone is prepared to kill again to keep both the political secrets and the personal ones buried.
Clark’s handling of repressed memory is effective: Pat’s flashbacks arrive in fragments — sounds, images, sensations — that gradually assemble into a coherent narrative of what happened in the house twenty-five years ago.
Collecting Stillwatch
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Signed first edition: $30–$70
- Without jacket: $5–$10