Friday Focus: Bookish Memes to Start the Weekend

 

 

It's Friday . . . time to share book excerpts with:

• Book Beginnings on Fridays hosted by Rose City Reader, where bloggers share the first sentence or more of a current read, as well as initial thoughts about the sentence(s), impressions of the book, or anything else that the opening inspires.  
• The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.
• First Line Friday hosted by Reading Is My SuperPower
  

 

Today I'm featuring a current read, Where Are The Children Now? by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke. The excerpts shared are from a hardcover version borrowed from the library.

 

 

 

Book Beginning/First Line:  Prologue

She could feel the damp evening winds coming in through the cracks around the windowpanes.

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Page 56:  "Or 'Helen'"--she made air quotes with her fingers--"made up the whole story and is a lying scoundrel hiding out with his mistress for a few weeks."

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My thoughts:  If you've ever read a Mary Higgins Clark novel, you know that even the simplest opening sentence can send chills up one's spine. This book is the sequel to Where Are The Children?--a wildly popular read when it was first published decades ago--a book that established MHC as the queen of suspense. After all these years, it is nice to revisit with the characters from the original story, who once again find themselves in a perilous situation.

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From GoodReads:  The legacy of the “Queen of Suspense” continues with the highly anticipated follow-up to Mary Higgins Clark’s iconic novel Where Are The Children?, featuring the children of Nancy Harmon, facing peril once again as adults.

Of the fifty-six bestsellers the “Queen of Suspense” Mary Higgins Clark published in her lifetime, Where Are the Children? was her biggest, selling millions of copies and forever transforming the genre of suspense fiction. In that story, a young California mother named Nancy Harmon was convicted of murdering her two children. Though released on a technicality, she was abandoned by her husband and became such a pariah in the media that she was forced to move across the country to Cape Cod, change her identity and appearance, and start a new life. Years later her two children from a second marriage, Mike and Melissa, would go missing, and Nancy yet again became the prime suspect—but this time, Nancy was able to confront the secrets buried in her past and rescue her kids from a dangerous predator.

Now, more than four decades since readers first met Nancy and her children, comes the thrilling sequel to the groundbreaking book that set the stage for future generations of psychological suspense novels. A lawyer turned successful podcaster, Melissa has recently married a man whose first wife died tragically, leaving him and their young daughter, Riley, behind. While Melissa and her brother, Mike, help their mom, Nancy, relocate from Cape Cod to the equally idyllic Hamptons, Melissa’s new stepdaughter goes missing. Drawing on the experience of their own abduction, Melissa and Mike race to find Riley to save her from the trauma they still struggle with—or worse.

Just like the original, Where Are The Children Now? keeps readers guessing and holding their breath until the very last page.

 

 

 

 

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This Friday Focus: Bookish Memes to Start the Weekend post was originally composed and/or compiled and published by Catherine for the blog, bookclublibrarian.com. It cannot be republished without attribution.