Moonlight Becomes You

April 28, 1997
This murder-thriller set in Newport, R.I., spent 14 weeks on PW's bestseller list.

April 1, 1996
Pretty photographer Maggie Holloway begins Clark's latest (after Silent Night) lying in a coffin buried in a grave, pulling desperately at a string that leads to a bell with no clapper. How she got there is the essence of a convoluted tale of a ritzy Newport, R.I., retirement home whose well-heeled residents seem to die with alarming frequency, leading to high-profit turnover of their apartments there. Latest to shed her mortal coil was Maggie's much-loved stepmother, a fact that led intrepid Maggie to take an unwise amount of interest in the deaths-and also to question why several of the graves seemed to have little funerary bells on them. As usual with Clark, there is a stalwart admirer whose love does not immediately speak its name, and a surfeit of suspicious characters, including a scholarly funeral nut, a shady investment broker, a venal lawyer, a drunken, inept doctor and a nosy nurse. There's some fun in the sprightly Newport oldsters, and the many scenes and characters are shifted around smoothly and with a practiced hand. The bells gimmick seems no more than that, however, and the book is light on thrills-though there's nothing to put off Clark's myriad fans. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild main selection; Reader's Digest Condensed Books selection; paperback rights to Pocket Books; author tour. (May).

January 1, 1996
More scary stuff from one of America's best-known suspense writers.

April 15, 1996
Professional photographer Maggie Holloway revisits the best part of her childhood after she runs into her former stepmother, Nuala Moore, at a Manhattan party. Nuala seems edgy, but Maggie never finds out why, for only days into their reunion, she finds her beloved Nuala murdered. Maggie is the unexpected inheritor of Nuala's Newport home, for which Maggie receives curiously generous, even overpriced, offers from several parties. Nuala had at one time planned on selling the property in order to move into a ritzy retirement home but had suddenly and without explanation changed her mind only days before her death. When Maggie also decides not to sell the property, she becomes the one squeaky cog in an otherwise well-oiled machine of fraud, murder, and deception. At Maggie's side are two suitors: the wealthy Liam, who suddenly begins paying more attention to her after Nuala's death, and the seemingly indifferent Neil, a kindhearted investment banker. Clark has written a clever story with interesting characters, particularly Liam's macabre, death-obsessed cousin, Earl. Though this is not her finest book, Clark's popularity will surely put "Moonlight" on the lists. ((Reviewed April 15, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)