Mary Higgins Clark, an American author living in New Jersey, is the writer of at least twenty-three suspense novels. From what I have read of her detective novels, suspense is the order of the day. Her novels are often concerned with family life and chronicle two or more generations, including child characters.
No Place Like Home, surely an ironic title, is the story of the murder of a woman, apparently committed by her ten-year-old daughter, Lisa, twenty-four years before the story starts. The child is now a thirty-four-year-old woman and still lives with a local reputation of being a child who murdered her mother, in spite of the court ruling that it was a tragic accident.
In order to blot out the past, Lisa is now Celia and is living in Manhattan where she is a successful interior decorator. She is happily married to a second husband, Alex, her first husband having died in a riding accident, and she has a young son, Jack, from her first marriage. All seems to be set for a happy outcome when her husband surprises her by buying her a house without consulting her and it turns out to be the childhood home where her mother was murdered. Skillfully, Mary Higgins Clark somehow stops us from asking how such a coincidence could have taken place.
From that point the suspense builds up. More and more characters are brought into the action and Celia, who has not told her second husband her life story, becomes increasingly determined to find out what happened on the night her mother was murdered, the trauma of the incident having led to loss of memory on her part. As she begins to relive the events that led to her mother's death, the suspense builds up and is maintained until the last chapter. An epilogue, two years on, finishes off the ends left in the story and the people who deserve to, live happily ever after - or so we hope.
I enjoyed this book and found it entertaining and difficult to put down. One guesses most of her books must be, by the success she has achieved worldwide. I have one reservation: the first novel I read of hers was A Cry in the Night and I found the part that the two small daughters play in the build-up of the suspense disturbing. A quick read through of the titles of some of her other books suggests that this may be true of more than one of her novels.
------
Rosemary Brown
Some of her other books published by Pocket Books are: Night-Time is My Time, Second Time Around, Daddy's Little Girl, On the Street Where You Live.