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Summary:
From America's Queen of Suspense comes a gripping tale of a young woman trying to unravel the mystery of a family tragedy -- a quest with terrifying repercussions.
It has been ten years since twenty-one-year-old Charles MacKenzie Jr. ("Mack") went missing. A Columbia University senior, about to graduate and already accepted at Duke University Law School, he walked out of his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side without a word to his college roommates and has never been seen again. However, he does make one ritual phone call to his mother every year: on Mother's Day. Each time, he assures her he is fine, refuses to answer her frantic questions, then hangs up. Even the death of his father, a corporate lawyer, in the tragedy of 9/11 does not bring him home or break the pattern of his calls.
Mack's sister, Carolyn, is now twenty-six, a law school graduate, and has just finished her clerkship for a civil court judge in Manhattan. She has endured two family tragedies, yet she realizes that she will never be able to have closure and get on with her life until she finds her brother. She resolves to discover what happened to Mack and why he has found it necessary to hide from them. So this year when Mack makes his annual Mother's Day call, Carolyn interrupts to announce her intention to track him down, no matter what it takes. The next morning after Mass, her uncle, Monsignor Devon MacKenzie, receives a scrawled message left in the collection basket: "Uncle Devon, tell Carolyn she must not look for me."
Mack's cryptic warning does nothing to deter his sister from taking up the search, despite the angry reaction of her mother, Olivia, and the polite disapproval of Elliott Wallace, Carolyn's honorary uncle, who is clearly in love with Olivia.
Carolyn's pursuit of the truth about Mack's disappearance swiftly plunges her into a world of unexpected danger and unanswered questions. What is the secret that Gus and Lil Kramer, the superintendents of the building in which Mack was living, have to hide? What do Mack's old roommates, the charismatic club owner Nick DeMarco and the cold and wealthy real estate tycoon Bruce Galbraith, know about Mack's disappearance? Is Nick connected to the disappearance of Leesey Andrews, who had last been seen in his trendy club? Can the police possibly believe that Mack is not only alive, but a serial killer, a shadowy predator of young women? Was Mack also guilty of the brutal murder of his drama teacher and the theft of his taped sessions with her?
Carolyn's passionate search for the truth about her brother -- and for her brother himself -- leads her into a deadly confrontation with someone close to her whose secret he cannot allow her to reveal.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
I expected more
Customer Rating:
I am a big fan of Mary Higgins Clark but this book was not as fast paced and intriguing as others. I was intrigued by the disappearance of the heroine's brother, by his Mother's Day calls every year and all the aspects of this story. I read the book quickly to get to the end of the mystery, which I will not reveal here. It is a good story worth reading but I liked other books from this author better. For instance, "Two little girls in blue" was much more exciting and suspenseful.
No one does it better!
Customer Rating:
Mary Higgins Clark has written another blockbuster. Fast-paced, cleverly plotted and unputdownable.
Charles McKenzie Jr. ("Mack") went missing ten years ago. A Columbia University senior, about to graduate and already accepted at Duke University Law School, he walked out of his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side without a word to his college roommates and has never been seen again. However, he does make a ritual phone call to his mother every year on Mother's Day. Each time, he assures her he is fine, refuses to answer here frantic questions, then hangs up. Even the death of his father, a corporate lawyer, in the tragedy of 9/11 does not bring him home or break the pattern of his calls.
Mack's sister Carolyn 26, realizes that she will never have closure and be able to go further with her life until she finds her brother, and sets out with her own personal investigation.
And so starts this amazing story, packed with questions, theories, suspects and dangers. The end is a big - and horrible - surprise. One does, during the approximate last quarter of the book, start to get an uneasy feeling about one of the key persons in particular, but all in all the plot is so extremely clever that it is impossible to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit, in spite of wage suspicions.
If you look for a book to last you a bit longer than a night or two, this is not it. Once you start, it's impossible to put down.
Yet another superb work from the master of suspense. Highly recommended!
A very good who-done-it
Customer Rating:
Each Mother's Day brings a call to Carolyn MacKenzie and her mother from the missing Charles MacKenzie Jr. It has been 10 years now since Mack first went missing. She plans to find her brother - dead or alive. With her father dying in 9/11 and Mack missing, Carolyn has had enough.
And now young women are going missing and the police think that Mack has something to do with it. Carolyn goes back to the investigator that her parents had hired and asks him what he remembers. He does not believe Mack has a part in the disappearance of the missing women and looks into the case again.
Carolyn doesn't stop there. She talks with the managers of the apartment that Mack and two friends shared just before he disappeared. They are very nervous and don't want her ask them any more questions. Nick and Bruce were the roommates. Carolyn had a crush on Nick but Mack didn't want him to be around his sister. Bruce is hostile to Carolyn. Maybe because his wife, Barbara, was in love with Mack before he disappeared. With all these possibilities, you won't believe the twist the ending has. All in all, this is a great book.
Jan Maxwell is easy to listen to and does do a good English accent. Most of the other characters sound about the same. She speaks clearly so you don't misunderstand any of the words and you don't lose track of the story line.
readable and forgettable
Customer Rating:
I decided to read a Mary Higgins Clark book to find out why she is a popular author, so I can't answer the useful question of how this compares to her other work.
Clark starts the book with an interesting hook - a person is missing and although he contacts his family every year, he insists that they not try to find him. Although the writing was quite bland, this hook and the twists of the plot were enough to keep me reading. However, in order to really have page-turning suspense the reader needs to care about what happens to the characters, but these characters were paper-thin. This was a readable book, but in the end you will forget about it.
out standing
Customer Rating:
Book arrived earlier than the timeline and arrived in the condition that I was told it would be. Good to to business with.
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