Mary Higgins Clark

Mary Higgins Clark (1927-2020) was an American suspense novelist widely credited with founding, and then dominating for four decades, the modern domestic-suspense genre: tightly plotted thrillers about ordinary, resourceful women -- mothers, professionals, sisters -- pulled into danger close to home, told without the graphic violence of the hardboiled tradition around her. Widowed young with five children to support, she wrote her breakthrough novel, Where Are the Children? (1975), around a day job, and its success (following a commercially unsuccessful 1969 biographical novel about George Washington) launched a career of nearly forty standalone bestsellers, almost all released in the autumn to a readership that came to expect a new Mary Higgins Clark thriller every year like clockwork. She was known in the American press as the 'Queen of Suspense.' Alongside her standalones, Clark created the recurring amateur-detective duo Alvirah and Willy Meehan (a lottery-winning former cleaning lady and her plumber husband) across seven books, several co-written with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, and in 2014 began the Under Suspicion series with crime novelist Alafair Burke, following television producer Laurie Moran. Clark died in January 2020 at 92; Burke has since continued the Under Suspicion series and wrote a 2023 sequel to Where Are the Children?, both published under Clark's name with her estate's blessing.