All Through The Night : A Suspense Story - Hardcover

Clark, Mary Higgins

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684856603 ISBN 13: 9780684856605

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

The best-selling author of You Belong to Me and Silent Night presents an inspiring new holiday mystery that features Alvirah and Willy, two popular characters from The Lottery Winner. (Mystery).

About this title

Review

Fans of Mary Higgins Clark and cozy mysteries will relish this Christmas confection. Unlike her previous holiday novel, Silent Night, All Through the Night is virtually free of life-and-death crime. Rather, it is a Dickensian tale of good deeds rewarded and crimes punished.

The wintry story begins on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with 18-year-old Sondra Lewis, an aspiring violinist, tearfully leaving her baby on the steps of St. Clement's Church. Unbeknownst to her, Lenny Centino is robbing that same church on the same night, with his attention particularly on the Church's diamond inlaid chalice. He finds a buggy outside the church and uses it for cover as he flees. Only later does he realize that his take for the night includes the infant Stellina (Italian for star). The narrative then abruptly moves ahead seven years. Clark's lottery-winning protagonists, Alvirah and her husband Willy (introduced in Weep No More, My Lady) return for some amateur sleuthing. Sister Cordelia's thrift shop doubles as an after-school recreation place for neighborhood children (including a shy little girl named Star), but the building has been condemned. Bessie Maher had vowed she was leaving the house to the nun and her children. Now that she is gone, the will indicates that the tenants of the house, Vic and Linda Baker, are the true heirs. As December rushes on towards Christmas, Alvirah struggles to put things right before the children are left in the cold.

Like the best holiday stories, All Through the Night steers toward sentimentality, but it veers back on course with narrative wit and Alvirah's charm. Clark's prose is lean and her plotting is brisk. This is a mystery that would be a pleasure to share aloud with a family gathered at the fireplace for some holiday cheer. --Patrick O'Kelley

From the Back Cover

With Silent Night, the Queen of Suspense gave her readers the perfect Christmas present. Now Mary Higgins Clark celebrates the season again with a riveting new novel, about which USA Today said, Mary Higgins Clark fans will find ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT a "consume-in-one-sitting Christmas treat".

When Alvirah and Willy, two of Clark's most beloved characters, become caught up in a Christmas mystery, all of Alvirah's deductive powers and Willy's world-class common sense are called upon. It begins when an unmarried woman leaves her newborn on the rectory doorstep of a Manhattan church. Meanwhile, a small-time thief and drug peddler is absconding from the church with a treasured artifact, a chalice adorned with a single star-shaped diamond. To elude the police, he grabs the stroller and disappears.

Seven years later, the young mother returns to the church where her child was kidnapped while Alvirah and Willy are helping neighborhood kids prepare for a Christmas pageant at an after-school shelter. But the future of the shelter is threatened when the city condemns the site and it is learned that the brownstone to which the shelter was moving has been willed to a smooth-talking couple, tenants in the building. Suspecting that the will is a fake and the tenants con artists, Alvirah sets out to discover the truth. Soon she finds herself in the middle of the puzzle of the missing child and chalice.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684856603
• ISBN 13: 9780684856605
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176