Daddy's Little Girl
By Mary Higgins Clark, FCLC '79.
291 pages. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
$26.00

In Daddy's Little Girl, Mary Higgins Clark writes about the shattering effect a murder has on the family of the teen-age victim, and of a young woman's attempts to keep her sister's convicted killer in jail.

Daddy's Little Girl follows Ellie Cavanaugh, an investigative reporter for an Atlanta newspaper. Twenty-two years ago, Ellie had found her older sister, Andrea, dead in a wealthy neighbor's garage. While still a young girl, Ellie had testified in the trial of Rob Westerfield, the privileged teenager who was convicted of the murder. All these years later Ellie is returning home: Westerfield is up for parole and she wants to keep the man who murdered her sister behind bars.

But was Westerfield guilty? Higgins Clark sets up doubts in the minds of some of the former friends and neighbors that Ellie meets when she returns home. Still, Ellie has no such doubts, and her attempts to dig into Westerfield's murky past put her on a collision course with her sister's killer.

Looking at the photo of Higgins Clark on the book's jacket, you get the feeling that this engaging woman, called "the Queen of Suspense," has a mother's concern for her characters. It would be difficult to imagine her letting anything very bad happen to Ellie, though Ellie does experience her share of close calls.

Higgins Clark's own story is a compelling one. She famously turned to writing when she was left a young widow with five children in 1964. Her first suspense novel, Where are the Children?, became a bestseller. In 1974, she entered Fordham's College at Lincoln Center, graduating summa cum laude in 1979. And she continued to write best-selling books.

Daddy's Little Girl is Higgins Clark's twenty-first novel. Writing in the first person, from Ellie's perspective, "has been a different kind of journey for me," she has said. She has also written three collections of short stories, and co-wrote two Christmas novellas with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark.
Her Web site, http://www.simonsays.com/mhclark, provides descriptions of her earlier books, as well as the writer's insights into her characters.

-Carolyn Farrar, FCO '82