Deck the Halls ANNOTATION
Once it becomes apparent that Luke Reilly is not going to keep his appointment, Alvirah offers the deeply troubled Regan a lift home. When a call comes through on Regan's cell phone, telling her that her father and his driver, Rosita Gonzalez, are being held for $1,000,000 ransom, Alvirah insists that Regan allow her to lend a hand in trying to gain their release, for while Regan may be a licensed private detective, based in Los Angeles, Alvirah has many valuable contacts among the ranks of New York's law enforcement community.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Joining forces for the first time, mother and daughter suspense superstars Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark bring the best of their unique and beloved personal styles to this masterfully told tale of intrigue and deception. Combining Carol Higgins Clark's popular Regan Reilly, and Mary Higgins Clark's Willy and Alvirah, featured in her earlier bestsellers The Lottery Winner and All Through the Night, Deck the Halls begins when Regan's father, Luke Reilly, mysteriously disappears just before Christmas. For help, Regan turns to her parents' neighbors, Willy ad Alvirah, with whom she shares not only a talent for detection, but an unusually accommodating genius of a dentist.
Together, as New York City prepares for Christmas, this colorful cast attempts to find Luke. Soon they discover that Luke is not just missing, but kidnapped along with the driver of the taxi in which he was riding, a single mother, and held for ransom by his partner's angry, disinherited son.
The result is a fast-moving cliffhanger for the Christmas season and a double dose of thrills for fans of Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Tessa Quayle, a beautiful young lawyer, is posted to Nairobi as the wife of British diplomat Justin Quayle. In the course of the voluntary work in which she becomes involved, she uncovers a trail of intentional malfeasance by the vast pharmaceutical multinational KVH, which is fast-tracking a new TB drug using Africans as guinea pigs. She first calls on the British government to intervene and then decides to take her evidence to Richard Leakey. Le Carr 's latest novel opens with Tessa's being murdered on her way to Leakey. Tessa was accompanied by her friend Arnold Bluhm, whom the official investigation finds guilty of her murder. But Tessa's husband begins his own probe, following her trail of contacts around the world. Le Carr 's ability to draw characters in depth, coupled with his unparalleled plotting and the authority with which he describes settings as various as Nairobi, Elba, Switzerland, and Canada, makes this a propulsive narrative and a lesson in the realities of a world run not by governments but by corporations. Highly recommended.--David Dodd, Marin Cty. Free Lib., San Rafael, CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Christmas is a time for family togetherness, so it figures that this first collaboration between bestselling Mary Higgins Clark (Before I Say Good-Bye, p. 404, etc.) and her daughter Carol (Twanged, 1998, etc.) tosses together so many regulars from both authors that there's barely room for the crooks. And a hapless pair of perps they are. Spurned heir C.B. Dingle is wrongly convinced that chain mortician Luke Reilly persuaded his late uncle to leave most of his fortune to a gardening league. His dimwitted partner, painter Petey Commet, seems to have sucked too much lead from the chartreuse he used on one of Luke's reception rooms. When they kidnap Luke in revenge, grabbing his part-time driver Rosie Gonzalez as well, and stash them on a houseboat moored in Edgewater, New Jersey, while they wait for a million-dollar ransom, these two hopeless duffers go up against not only Luke's family—his world-famous mystery writer wife Nora and his shamus daughter Regan—but against lottery-winning ex—cleaning lady Alvirah Meehan and her husband Willy as well. The mother-and-daughter authors—who are so obviously on the same wavelength that even though the abduction plot and some of the dialogue seem recycled from their earlier books, everything blends together in seamless inconsequence—produce a holiday rout for the forces of junior-league evil undisturbed by any hint of real villains, real detectives, or real suspense. Admire the shipshape carpentry as the preposterous story purrs along while still delivering fewer thrills than most fruitcakes.
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