Where Are You Now?

Where Are You Now is one of Mary Higgins Clark’s mid career suspense novels, published in 2008. The book is built around one of the more unusual premises in her wider catalogue. Carolyn MacKenzie has spent the past ten years dealing with the disappearance of her older brother Mack, who walked out of his Columbia University apartment one day shortly before his graduation and has not been seen since. The MacKenzie family has continued to receive a single annual phone call from Mack each Mother’s Day, a brief message saying he is alive and asking the family not to look for him, but no other contact and no actual encounter has occurred in the entire decade.

Now Carolyn, having recently passed the bar exam and become a lawyer, has decided that she is going to find her brother. The Mother’s Day calls are not enough. The family deserves to know what actually happened to Mack and what kind of life he has been living during the years he has chosen to remain hidden. As Carolyn investigates, the case turns out to be considerably more complicated than the simple missing persons mystery she had been expecting. Mack’s disappearance turns out to be connected to a series of other disappearances of young women from the Columbia University area, and Carolyn’s investigation begins to attract the kind of dangerous attention that she had not been prepared for.

Mary Higgins Clark uses her standard rotating perspectives technique, with chapters from Carolyn, from various supporting characters, and from a particularly dangerous figure whose presence in the wider story slowly reveals itself across the page count. The case develops into the kind of suburban suspense that has been her signature for decades, with the apparent simplicity of the original disappearance turning out to involve much darker connections to other crimes that the original investigators had never connected to Mack’s case.

The Manhattan setting is rendered with the kind of specific detail that her readers know from her many other New York based novels. The mystery itself is the kind of carefully constructed puzzle her readers enjoy, with the slow accumulation of details across the page count building toward the eventual reveal. The annual Mother’s Day phone call premise gives the novel its distinctive flavor within the wider Mary Higgins Clark catalogue, with the strange ritual of the calls and the family’s slowly developing recognition that Mack may not actually be in control of his own situation providing the emotional engine of the case.

For longtime Mary Higgins Clark fans, Where Are You Now is a satisfying mid career entry. For new readers, the standalone nature of the suspense plot makes it an accessible introduction to her style.