Hey, everyone. Since I’m still busy writing, and haven’t had time to read a lot the past month, I decided today I would share three books by one of my all-time favorite authors.
Sometime in the late 1970’s, I was in a book store with my brother. He and I often made trips to the mall. Most often, we only went into two places – Hasting’s Records and B. Dalton Books. We were always looking to add to our collections of music and books.
Most often, I perused the fiction section. One evening a title caught my eye. Where Are the Children?
It sounded interesting, so I pulled the book from the shelf and looked at the cover. On it was a house with a sloped yard leading down to a body of water. Storm clouds hovered on the horizon. But the thing that caught my attention was a single red mitten lying on the ground. I read the back cover:
Where Are The Children
Nancy Harmon had been found guilty in a California court of murdering her two young children, but she was released from prison on a legal technicality. Deciding to make a fresh start, to change her identity, she left San Francisco and sought tranquillity on Cape Cod.
Seven years later, Nancy is remarried and has two small children: five-year-old Michael and three-year-old Missy. Finally she feels that she has been able to reclaim all that she had lost. Then the nightmare begins again.
One day a local Cape Cod paper runs an article about a famous California murder trial involving a mother accused of killing her two children. Along with the article is a photo of Nancy. On that same morning, Michael and Missy disappear. They had been playing in the yard, but when she looked for them, they were gone…all that remained was Missy’s red mitten.
While Nancy becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of her children, no one in the small Cape Cod town is aware of a stranger in their midst — someone whose plans for revenge have been festering for seven long years.
I purchased the book, took it home, and found it difficult to put down. From then on, I was hooked, always looking forward to her next release. Here are a few more of favorites:
Moonlight Becomes You
Set in Newport, Rhode Island, in a world of old money and proud names, Moonlight Becomes You has at its center Maggie Holloway, an independent young woman who has put personal tragedy behind her and become one of the fashion world’s most successful photographers.
Accompanying her date to a party in Manhattan — a kind of family reunion for the Moore clan of Newport — Maggie is reunited with a woman who had once been her stepmother and who remains one of her fondest childhood memories. Nuala Moore is equally thrilled to see Maggie, and the two quickly get beyond old pains and resume their friendship.
Nuala, now widowed, invites Maggie to visit her in Newport, and when Maggie readily accepts, Nuala plans a dinner for a group of friends so they can meet her long-lost stepdaughter. But when Maggie arrives, she finds Nuala dead, the victim of an apparently random break-in and robbery.
Maggie is heartbroken at the loss and further stunned when she learns that, only days before her death, Nuala had changed her will and left her charming Victorian house to her stepdaughter, the only proviso being that Maggie occasionally visit an old friend, Greta Shipley, who lives in Latham Manor, an elegant retirement home in Newport.
It is when she accompanies Mrs. Shipley to the cemetery to visit Nuala’s grave, as well as those of other friends Mrs. Shipley has recently lost, that Maggie discovers that something is wrong. Using her skills as a photographer to aid her in uncovering the secrets hidden on the gravesites, she soon realizes that Nuala’s death may not have been a random killing at all but rather part of a diabolical plot conceived by a twisted and unfeeling mind.
Suddenly it becomes all too apparent to Maggie that Nuala’s killer must have been someone she trusted completely. Then, when Greta Shipley dies virtually without warning of supposedly natural causes, Maggie becomes convinced that there is a connection between these two and other recent deaths among the older women of Newport.
What Maggie doesn’t realize is that she has become a target for the killer as well and that each clue she uncovers brings her closer and closer to a shocking and unimaginable fate.
With a sense of swiftly mounting danger, and with the skill and insight into human nature that have made all Mary Higgins Clark’s books major bestsellers, Moonlight Becomes You is enthralling suspense.
Remember Me
A killer turns a young family’s dream holiday into an unfathomable nightmare.
Menley Nichols and her husband, Adam, a criminal attorney, rent a house on Cape Cod, in the hope of restoring their faltering marriage. The birth of their daughter, Hannah, has revitalized their relationship, but Menley has never stopped blaming herself for the accidental death of her two-year-old son. The serenity of the Cape promises a new start.
In Remember House, an eighteenth-century landmark with a sinister past, strange incidents force Menley to relive the accident that killed her son, and she begins to fear for Hannah’s safety. Then Adam takes on a client suspected of murder when his wealthy young bride of only three months drowns in a storm — and the family is drawn into a rising tide of terror. A confrontation on a dark, rain-swept beach leads to a harrowing climax that only Mary Higgins Clark could have created.
I’ll Be Seeing You
The murdered woman could have been her double. When reporter Meghan Collins sees the sheet-wrapped corpse in a New York City hospital, she feels as if she’s staring into her own face. And Meghan has troubles enough already without this bizarre experience.
Nine months ago, her much-loved father’s car spun off a New York bridge. Now, investigators are saying that there’s no trace of his car in the river, and they suspect he faked his own death. With frightening speed, links start to appear between Meghan’s father and her dead lookalike.
Meghan may be in danger herself, but she’s determined to find the truth to the mystery. In a nightmare journey spiraling from New York to Connecticut to Arizona, Meghan finds that the truth can sometimes be deadly.
I haven’t read any of her recent work, but at the age of ninety-one, she’s still writing. Some of her latest books are co-authored. Since 1975, she’s written a total of fifty-one books, all of which have become bestsellers. Where Are the Children is now in its seventy-fifth printing.
Joan Hall 
You must be logged in to post a comment.