Mary Higgins Clark

Ellie Cavanaugh was only seven when her older sister, Andrea, was murdered near their home in rural Westchester County. It was Ellie’s testimony that led to the conviction of a man, who steadfastly denied his guilt, but spent twenty-two years in prison. When he comes up for parole, Ellie protests, but the convicted killer is set free and returns home. Ellie also returns, intent on writing a book that will prove his guilt. But as she delves deeper into her research, she uncovers horrifying facts that shed a new light on her sister’s murder. And with each discovery, she comes closer to a confrontation with a desperate killer…

A minor road accident landed county prosecutor Katie DeMaio in Westlake Hospital. That night, from her window, she thought she saw a man load a woman’s body into the trunk of a car…or was it just a sleeping pill-induced nightmare? At work the next day, Katie began investigating a suicide that looked more like murder. Initial evidence pointed elsewhere, but medical examiner Richard Carroll saw a trail leading to Dr. Edgar Highley. He suspected that the famous doctor’s work “curing” infertile women was more than controversial–that it was deceitful, depraived, and often deadly. But before Richard could tell Katie his fears, she left the office for the weekend and an appointment for routine surgery…in Dr. Highley’s operating room.

In a riveting new thriller from America’s Queen of Suspense, a young woman is ensnared into returning to a place she had wanted to leave behind forever — her childhood home. There, at the age of ten, Liza Barton had shot her mother, trying desperately to protect her from her estranged step-father, Ted Cartwright. Despite his claim that the shooting was a deliberate act, the Juvenile Court ruled the death an accident. Many people, however, agreed with Cartwright, and the tabloids compared her to the infamous murderess Lizzie Borden, pointing even to the similarity of their names.

To erase Liza’s past, her adoptive parents change her name to Celia. At age twenty-eight, a successful interior designer in Manhattan, she marries a childless sixty-year-old widower, Laurence Foster, and they have a son. Before their marriage, she reveals to him her true identity. Two years later, on his deathbed, he makes her swear never to tell anyone so that their son, Jack, will not carry the stigma of her past. Two years later, Celia is happily remarried. Her peace of mind is shattered when her new husband, Alex Nolan, surprises her with a gift — the house in Mendham, New Jersey, where she killed her mother. On the day they move in, they find the words little lizzie’s place — beware painted on the lawn, splotches of red paint all over the house, and a skull and crossbones carved into the door.

More and more, there are signs that someone in the community knows Celia’s true identity. When Georgette Grove, the real estate agent who sold the house to Alex, is brutally murdered and Celia is the first on the crime scene, she becomes a suspect. As Celia fights to prove her innocence, she is not aware that she and her son, Jack, are now the targets of a killer.

Binding:  Hard Cover with Dust Coat.

Published in 2005, 368

This book is in an excellent condition.

The definition of an owl had always pleased him: a night bird of prey…sharp talons and soft plumage which permits noiseless flight…applied figuratively to a person of nocturnal habits. ‘I am The Owl’, he would whisper to himself after he had selected his prey, ‘and nighttime is my time.’”

Jean Sheridan, a college dean and prominent historian, sets out to her hometown to attend the twenty-year reunion of Stonecroft Academy alumni, where she is to be honored along with six other members of her class. There is something uneasy in the air: one woman in the group about to be feted, Alison Kendall, a beautiful, high-powered Hollywood agent, drowned in her pool during an early-morning swim. Alison is the fifth woman in the class whose life has come to a sudden, mysterious end.

Adding to Jean’s sense of unease is a taunting, anonymous fax she received, referring to her daughter — a child she had given up for adoption twenty years ago.

At the award dinner, Jean is introduced to Sam Deegan, a detective obsessed by the unsolved murder of a young woman who may hold the key to the identity of the Stonecroft killer. Jean does not suspect that among the distinguished people she is greeting is The Owl, a murderer nearing the countdown on his mission of vengeance against the Stonecroft women who had mocked and humiliated him, with Jean as his final victim.

Binding:  Hard Cover with Dust Coat.

Published in 2004, 576 pages.

Large Print.

This book is in an excellent condition.