Daddy’s Gone A Hunting

Daddy’s Gone A Hunting is one of Mary Higgins Clark’s late career suspense novels, published in 2013. The book is built around a premise that draws on Mary Higgins Clark’s typical territory of suburban families with hidden secrets, professional women caught in dangerous situations, and the kind of slow building threat that her readers had been following her for across decades. The story centers on Hannah Connelly, a successful clothing designer in Manhattan whose older sister Kate is critically injured in an explosion at the family’s antique furniture restoration warehouse in Long Island City. Kate had been at the warehouse late at night for reasons she is now unable to explain, and the night watchman is missing along with her.

As Hannah and her family wait through Kate’s coma and try to figure out what she had been doing at the warehouse, the investigation begins to suggest that the explosion was not an accident. Kate had been working with the night watchman on something she had not told anyone about, and the family business turns out to be tied up in matters that go back decades and that involve much darker secrets than the legitimate antique restoration that the Connellys had built their reputation on.

Mary Higgins Clark spent more than four decades writing what was essentially a single sustained genre, the suburban suspense novel with female protagonists in difficult circumstances and a mystery that the heroine has to solve before the danger reaches her. By her late career, she had refined the formula to clockwork precision. Daddy’s Gone A Hunting fits comfortably into this tradition. The pacing is brisk, the chapters are short, the multiple perspectives give the reader information the central characters do not yet have, and the resolution comes together in the final third with the kind of careful explanation her readers expect.

The Mary Higgins Clark brand was so well established by this point that her late novels could rely on the audience’s familiarity with her conventions. For longtime fans, Daddy’s Gone A Hunting is a satisfying late entry. For new readers, the standalone nature of the family business mystery makes it an accessible introduction to her style.