New
York Times bestselling author Carol Higgins Clark has written fourteen
previous Regan Reilly mysteries. She is also co-author, with her mother,
Mary Higgins Clark, of a bestselling holiday suspense series. Carol’s
first mystery, Decked, was published in 1992 and was nominated for both
the Anthony and the Agatha Awards. - See more at:
http://carolhigginsclark.com/biography/#sthash.00cpGagA.dpufPrivate Investigator Regan Reilly and her husband, Jack “no relation” Reilly, head of the NYPD Major Case Squad, are about to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. They are looking forward to a quiet romantic weekend out of town. Wouldn’t you know their choice of destination provides them with anything but!
"Wrecked"
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| It was all I could to to quit reading about halfway through this book. Amateurish, often silly. Dialogue leans toward farce. |
Arriving at the Cape late at night, Regan and Jack are just in time to experience the beginning of a major storm. The next morning, Cape Cod Bay is quite a sight, churning with whitecaps. The wind is howling ferociously. Sheets of rain are pelting the house. Regan is looking forward to settling in the den with Jack and watching the storm.
However, the best laid plans . . .
In the bedroom, Regan opens the curtains to find Skip, the Reillys’ young caretaker, pressing his nose against the glass, supposedly checking for leaks. A moment later, Jack arrives home from the market, two gossipy older women who live up the street in tow. A branch crashed through their living room window, and they need a place to stay. When Regan thought things couldn’t get any worse, Skip comes running into the house, distraught that he’d just discovered Adele Hopkins, the woman renting the house next door, in a heap at the bottom of her staircase to the beach. Regan and Jack run back down with him, but huge waves are crashing on the shore. Hopkins is gone, presumably swept out to sea.
Who was Adele Hopkins? No one knows. The sixty-ish loner, who moved in five months ago, shunned her neighbors. Even her landlords, friends of the Reillys, have no idea how to locate her next of kin. Discovered in her dining room are stacks of apology cards she’d not yet sent and bags of decorative pillows that are embroidered with the saying grudge me, grudge me not.
Regan and Jack begin an investigation to help their friends track down Hopkins’s family. They start by interviewing two young women who own the shop where Adele had bought the pillows. Pippy and Ellen opened Pillow Talk after they both lost their jobs. When a newspaper article revealing the terrible way the women had been treated by their former employers was posted on the Internet, business took off, they started to become well-known, and the Pillow Talk website became a place for people who had had similar experiences to vent their feelings.
Pippy and Ellen just received an anonymous e-mail from someone who spews venom about her former rowing coach—Adele Hopkins. Could she be the same Adele Hopkins?
Regan and Jack’s search for clues to this mysterious woman’s identity makes for an anniversary weekend they’ll never forget!
“Fleeced”
Manhattan’s once tony Settler’s Club, now reduced to letting space to Miss Lydia and her Meaningful Connections singles’ gatherings and Maldwin Feckles and his ill-attended school for butlers (current enrollment: four students), is about to receive a hundredth birthday windfall: Longtime members Nat and Ben, joint-owners of four immensely valuable diamonds, have decided to sell them and donate the proceeds to the club.
But Nat slips in the tub; Ben falls under a bus, and—abracadabra!—the diamonds are suddenly missing. Thomas Pilsner, the rookie Settler’s manager, asks his p.i. friend Regan Reilly, in town to attend a crime writers’ conference with her world-famous author-mom, to help out.
Were the two deaths mere accidents? And wherever could those diamonds be? Using Nat’s club apartment as her sleuthing base, Regan finds herself surrounded by his and his late wife’s sheep collection: life-size sheep with sparkly eyes, sheep ornaments that have been collecting dust for years, sheep appliqués on towels, and more varieties than you can knit sweaters from.
She’s also beset by a slew of con artists, burglars, and worse at one of Miss Lydia’s soirees. A genuine English butler arrives, a New York film director departs, and those life-sized sheep are trundled all over town before the Club gets what it deserves, and so do all the culprits, though not the long-suffering reader.
“Zapped”
Three separate investigations, conducted during a blackout, propel Clark’s diverting 11th mystery to feature PI Regan Reilly.
Soon after Regan and her husband, Jack, head of the NYPD Major Case Squad, return home to Manhattan from a weekend on the Cape, the lights go out across the city.
In the darkness, Regan is dismayed to discover an intruder has left behind a stun gun in their apartment, which is undergoing renovations. Hours later, Jack looks into the theft of some unusual glass sculptures from a SoHo art gallery.
In addition, the pair become involved in the frantic search for Georgina Mathieson, a psychotic with a track record for branding blond men, before she can claim her next victim.
The number of coincidences, including one that allows the heroes to save the day in the nick of time, may be on the high side, but fans of lighter crime fare will be satisfied.
New York Times bestselling author Carol Higgins Clark has written 14 previous Regan Reilly mysteries. She is also co-author, with her mother, Mary Higgins Clark, of a bestselling holiday suspense series.
Carol’s first mystery, "Decked," was published in 1992 and was nominated for both the Anthony and the Agatha Awards.
