All around the town

✍ Scribed by Clark, Mary Higgins

• Book ID: 106866556
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: en-GB
• Weight: 141 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780671673659

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

Effectively exploiting her canny knack for placing women and children in deadly peril, Clark has pulled out all the stops in her newest effort (after Loves Music, Loves to Dance ). As a child, Laurie Kenyon was kidnapped and abused by a creepy pair named Bic and Opal, and she developed complex multiple personalities as a result. Now she is a college senior and a prime suspect in the murder of an attractive male professor. Might one of her personalities have been responsible? If so, can her protective sister Sarah, now an ace lawyer? confusing as is--if she's prosecutor, she wouldn't be defending her sister , defend her successfully? And will Bic and Opal, now successful televangelists, manage to silence her if she seems likely to identify them as her childhood tormentors? The plotting is swift and slickly managed, with a genuinely surprising twist toward the end. Clark wastes no time on extraneous details of character and atmosphere, but the very skills that make her a popular fast read mean that readers who look for nuance, flavor and shading even in their suspense thrillers will find their cravings unsatisfied. Still, of its efficient, machine-made type, this is a suspenseful page-turner. 500,000 first printing; Literary Guild main selection; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

For her ninth sure-fire bestseller, Clark returns to what she does best: using a threatened child (this time, a regressive college-student traumatized by a childhood kidnapping) to grab you by the throat and shake well. Back in 1974, four-year-old Laurie Kenyon was abducted from her posh New Jersey home by Bic and Opal Hawkins, a pair of hippies who raped and terrorized her for two years before the heat got so close they turned her loose. Now she's an honor student at Clinton College who unwittingly harbors four personalities--sexy Leona, truculent Kay, four-year-old Debbie, and a nine-year-old boy--that she's developed to keep her childhood memories at bay. Meanwhile, her kidnappers have transformed themselves into TV preachers on the brink of stardom who keep putting scary photos, knives, and severed chicken heads in Laurie's way in case she recognizes them and wants to speak out. The flash point comes with the murder of personable prof Allan Grant, who'd just gone before the administration with proof that the steamy letters from ``Leona'' he'd been getting were typed on Laurie's typewriter. When Laurie finds herself standing over Grant unable to remember whether or not she killed him, it's up to big sister Sarah, fanatically dedicated to protecting Laurie, to quit the D.A.'s office, take charge of Laurie's defense, and incidentally begin a chaste romance with Justin Donnelly, who's trying to tease the truth out of all those alter egos even as Bic Opal step up their campaign from threats to violence. Not enough menace for you? Clark even throws in the mystery of who really killed Grant, though her heart's not in it: broad hints from the outset will tip off all but the most witless readers. No whodunit, then--but Clark's legion of fans, enthralled by her undeniable skill in pushing their buttons, won't even notice. Just be grateful the author isn't running for office. (Literary Guild Split Dual Selection for July) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.