Mary Higgins Clark, Where Are You Now?

Mary Higgins Clark, Where Are You Now? Mary Higgins Clark's novel Where Are You Now? catches the attention of even the casual browser in a library or bookstore with its unusual -- and effective -- title. Readers of fiction are accustomed to novels that either are told in the first-person -- with a narrator who uses the pronoun "I" while telling the story -- or else or are told in third-person narration that relates the doings of the characters without much attention to the impersonal narrator.

But how many novels are told in the second person? Mary Higgins Clark's novel actually uses the first-person in telling the story -- the book is narrated by Carolyn MacKenzie, a twenty-six-year-old woman (who has completed law school and a clerkship with a judge in New York City, but who is not officially a lawyer) who investigates the central mystery of the story herself, and who tells her own story here -- but it catches our attention with its second-person title.

This runs the risk of seeming gimmicky or inappropriate -- an inattentive librarian might accidentally mis-shelve this book with "Self-Help" titles, perhaps -- but any reader whose curiosity is piqued enough to flip open to the first page and start reading, it is hard to imagine Mary Higgins Clark selecting any other title for telling the suspenseful story that she has to tell.

In a sense, the immediacy of her title -- which seems to address itself directly to the reader -- is the perfect advertisement for the immediacy of the suspense: both grab the reader by the collar and do not let go. The question that forms the title of Mary Higgins Clark's book is also the one question that has weighed on the mind of the narrator, Carolyn MacKenzie, for years.

It is the obsessive thought that weaves its way through Carolyn's daily life, every day, thinking about her brother Charles, known to Carolyn and her mother by his family nickname, Mack. That is because the novel's first chapter (following, of course, the unusual title) outlines the very unusual situation that the Mackenzies are in. The novel begins with Carolyn waiting for the stroke of midnight that technically begins Mother's Day in May, to hold a 24-hour vigil waiting for a Mother's Day call from Mack.

Although many mothers and grandmothers wait obsessively by the phone for a call on this particular holiday, the MacKenzies are in an unusual situation because nobody has seen Charles for a decade. Carolyn patiently tells the story of her brother's bizarre and inexplicable disappearance ten years before: Mack was in his final year at Columbia and had just gotten into Duke for law school, but apparently vanished from his apartment without being seen by his roommates.

But Carolyn and her mother know Mack is alive and they know that his disappearance was his own doing because every year he calls his mother on Mother's Day to let her know that he is alive and well. In making these calls Mack refuses to answer his mother's frantic questions -- including, most notably, the question posed in Mary Higgins Clark's title. Every Mother's Day Mack calls his mother to.