Two Little Girls in Blue

Two Little Girls in Blue is one of Mary Higgins Clark’s mid career suspense novels, published in 2006. The book is built around the kidnapping of three year old twin girls Kelly and Kathy Frawley from their family home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, while their parents are out at a charity event. The family had hired a babysitter for the evening, and the kidnapping has occurred under the babysitter’s nose. The kidnappers demand a ransom of eight million dollars, the wealthy family pays, and one of the twins, Kelly, is returned safely to the family. The other twin, Kathy, the kidnappers say, has died.

The central premise that drives the rest of the novel is the unusual psychic connection between identical twins. Kelly, returned to the family, refuses to accept that her sister Kathy is actually dead. She speaks of Kathy in the present tense. She acts as though Kathy is still somewhere reachable, and the family begins to wonder whether the surviving twin’s insistence is just denial or whether Kelly is somehow actually able to communicate with Kathy across whatever distance separates them. The investigation that follows the failed ransom payment continues to develop, with the FBI agents working the case slowly turning up evidence that suggests the original kidnapping operation was more complicated than the simple ransom plot it had appeared to be.

Mary Higgins Clark uses her standard rotating perspectives technique, with chapters from the parents, from Kelly, from various FBI agents, from the kidnappers themselves, and from the wider cast of suspects and supporting characters. The slowly clarifying picture of what actually happened to Kathy and what the original kidnapping operation had really been about develops across the page count, with the kind of carefully constructed suspense that her readers had been following her for across decades.

The twin connection element gives the novel its distinctive flavor within Mary Higgins Clark’s catalogue. The supernatural or paranormal elements she occasionally used were typically handled with careful ambiguity, leaving the reader uncertain whether the apparent psychic events were real or whether more conventional explanations were available. Two Little Girls in Blue takes the twin connection seriously enough that the reader is asked to consider both the practical investigative consequences of the connection and the wider emotional and psychological reality that the connection represents for the family.

Mary Higgins Clark spent more than four decades writing what was essentially a single sustained genre. By 2006 she had refined the formula to clockwork precision. Two Little Girls in Blue fits comfortably into this tradition. For longtime fans, the novel is a satisfying mid career entry.