I’ve Got You Under My Skin

I’ve Got You Under My Skin is Mary Higgins Clark’s 2014 novel and the first book in her Under Suspicion series, the late career project that she would continue across several more books, eventually with co writer Alafair Burke. The series introduces Laurie Moran, a television producer at Fisher Blake Studios in New York who has been developing a special investigations program. The premise of her show is built around cold cases in which someone close to the victim has fallen under suspicion but never been formally charged, with each program bringing the original suspects together to revisit the case on camera.

The pilot for the program is built around the unsolved 1994 murder of Betsy Bonner Powell, the wealthy socialite known as the Graduation Gala mother because she was killed shortly after hosting a graduation party for her daughter Claire and three of her college friends. The case has remained one of the great unsolved Manhattan murders, with the four young women who slept in the house that night, Claire and her three friends, all having been quietly suspected by various interested parties since the killing. Laurie’s program is going to bring all four women back together at the original Hamptons mansion where the murder occurred, alongside the daughter’s stepfather and the household staff who were present that night.

The production turns out to be considerably more dangerous than anyone had expected. Someone does not want the case reopened, and as the four former friends arrive at the house and the production begins, the threats begin to escalate from anonymous warnings to direct danger. Laurie has her own complicated personal history that motivates her interest in cold cases. Her FBI agent husband was murdered five years earlier in a still unsolved case, and the work she does on her program is partly her way of refusing to accept that any case has to remain forever unsolved.

Mary Higgins Clark spent more than four decades writing what was essentially a single sustained genre. By her late career, she had refined the formula to clockwork precision. I’ve Got You Under My Skin establishes the Under Suspicion series with the kind of confidence her brand had earned across many novels.

For longtime Mary Higgins Clark fans, this is the foundational novel of one of her late series.