Where are the Children Now? Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke

 Where are the Children Now?  Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke

She read

Release Date:  April 18, 2023

For those readers unfamiliar with Mary Higgins Clark, a little history. …Clark, who died in 2020, has been attributed with creating the modern suspense novel.  Of her 50+ bestsellers, her first, “Where are the Children?” (1975) sold the most and is still in print, it’s 75th edition.   

Clark was one of my mother’s favorite authors.  I have read all her books and, out of sentimentality,  continue to do so as a matter of routine, and also because I like them.

In the first Where are the Children? a mother in California was convicted of killing her two children and then released on a technicality.  Abandoned by her husband, she changed her identity, moved to Cape Cod, and remarried.  Her two children from this second marriage then went missing. Suspicion again fell on the mother, but eventually the children were rescued and the true perpetrator identified.  

In this sequel, decades later, the daughter, Melissa,  who had been kidnapped is married to a widower with a young daughter.  When that child goes missing, suspicion falls on Melissa and it is up to her and her brother to solve the case, while also confronting their unresolved issues related to their early experience. 

There are twists and turns and the suspense of wanting to find the truth kept me glued to the book that I finished in a day, eschewing all outside interruptions including a beautiful day outside! MHC books do have a bit of a fairy tailish quality to them.  With some very likable characters, they all seem to end with something positive coming out of something terrible. 

It has been so many years (and so many books!) since I read the first book, I remembered no details from it; that did not interfere with being able to pick up the past history as it related to this story. 

Thanks to #netgalley and #simonandschuster #simonbooks for the ARC.