All Around the Town

January 1, 2004
Clark pulls out all the stops in this efficiently suspenseful page-turner, a Literary Guild main selection and a 15-week PW bestseller in cloth, telling of a college senior accused of murder and the televangelist couple who abused her as a child.

May 4, 1992
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.

April 15, 1992
When four-year-old Laurie Kenyon ventures out into the front yard to wave at a funeral procession against the strict rules imposed by her mother, nightmarish repercussions ensue. She is kidnapped by a child molester who is abetted by his wife. Even though Laurie is released a few years later and returned to her family, the horror is buried within her psyche. Decades later, when her college professor is found brutally murdered, Laurie is convicted despite determined legal representation by her own sister. A psychiatrist discovers that Laurie has four other personalities. This "Three Faces of Eve-"like story lacks the power and credibility of the original. Higgins' tale has moments of sheer terror but more (and longer) stretches of sheer boredom. ((Reviewed Apr. 15, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)