Where Are the Children?

Mary Higgins Clark, America’s Queen of Suspense, is the author of twenty national bestsellers. Her career as one of the most successful writers of our time was launched with the publication of Where Are the Children? This debut suspense thriller, originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1975, was Mary Higgins Clark’s first bestseller. It marked a turning point in her life and set the standard for her distinctive page-turning style. Where Are the Children? is the story of a woman whose past holds a terrible secret. Nancy Harmon had been found guilty in a California court of murdering her two young children, but she was released from prison on a legal technicality. Deciding to make a fresh start, to change her identity, she left San Francisco and sought tranquillity on Cape Cod. Seven years later, Nancy is remarried and has two small five-year-old Michael and three-year-old Missy. Finally she feels that she has been able to reclaim all that she had lost. Then the nightmare begins again. One day a local Cape Cod paper runs an article about a famous California murder trial involving a mother accused of killing her two children. Along with the article is a photo of Nancy. On that same morning, Michael and Missy disappear. They had been playing in the yard, but when she looked for them, they were gone…all that remained was Missy’s red mitten. While Nancy becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of her children, no one in the small Cape Cod town is aware of a stranger in their midst — someone whose plans for revenge have been festering for seven long years.