Where Are The Children?: Mary Higgins Clark: Simon & Schuster: $7.95: 223 pages.
What kind of panic would you feel if suddenly, one morning you went out to bring your two small children in from play and found them gone? You look everywhere for them, close to hysteria, close to madness. what makes it worse is that this is the second time it has happened, but the first time, your first two children were found dead, smothered.
Where Are The children? is about such a nightmare. Nancy Harmon lost her first two children in California. They were murdered, and she was the one on trial. She was the accused, while she suffered and cried with the bereavement of Peter and Lisa. A legal technicality spared her imprisonment, maybe death. She then moved East (as far as she could go: New England), changed her hair color, and married again, becoming Nancy Eldridge.
Now the Eldridge children were missing. They were out playing in the morning sun, then they were gone. We are sure from the start (we hope) that Mrs. Harmon-Eldridge never killed her first two children, but the question is, who did? Certainly not Carl Harmon, who committed suicide soon after. Ceratinly not Rob Legler, a witness at the trial who leter fled to Canada as a draft evader. Certainly not a mysterious stranger who followed her all the way to New England.
The morning the children disappear, an article appears in the Cape Cod Community News. It is an article about Nancy Harmon, with a picture of her during the trial. Could the article have inspired someone to mimic the crime of seven years ago? Could Nancy herself been driven over the brink after reading the article and done something to her own children?
The author makes good her promise of excitement from the beginning of the book. In Where Are The Children?, an unknown motive steers the story on unusual curves along roads of mystery. The time the reader spends on this novel will be spent on the edge of his chair, toes poised in such a way so as to kick someone should they attempt to distract him. The reader is caught up in the adrenalin-producing dramatics.
Mary Higgins Clark has written an electrifying novel. The characters are completely believeable and move the book forward at a pace which we hate to see come to an end.
Ms. Clark lives in Washington Township, N.J. with her five children. She was an original partner with the Aerial Communications Inc. Ms. Clark is now working on her next book, and we look forward to another thriller.