WickedGirl's Book Notes

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that weaves together interconnected stories about a group of characters connected to the music industry, exploring themes of time, memory, and aging through an innovative narrative structure.

In the summer of 1944, a polio epidemic sweeps through Newark's Jewish community. Playground director Bucky Cantor watches helplessly as children in his care fall ill - then flees to a mountain camp where he believes he brings the disease with him, destroying his life with guilt.

On the night a famous actor dies performing King Lear in Toronto, a deadly flu pandemic begins. Twenty years later, a traveling theater troupe performs Shakespeare for scattered survivors - and one of them carries a mysterious comic book given to her by the actor the night he died.

When high school valedictorian Brianna O'Brien is found murdered in remote Skeleton Canyon, her wealthy parents blame her forbidden Hispanic boyfriend - but Sheriff Joanna Brady suspects the family racism masks darker secrets involving smugglers using their land.

When the town veterinarian who killed a woman while driving drunk is found murdered by pitchfork in his burning barn, Sheriff Joanna Brady must prove that the obvious suspect - the victim grieving widower - is innocent while juggling multiple crises including a hostage situation involving her own daughter.

The second Under Suspicion novel and the first Mary Higgins Clark / Alafair Burke collaboration: Laurie Moran, producer of a cold-case television show, reopens the twenty-year-old murder of UCLA student Susan Dempsey - found strangled in Laurel Canyon Park missing a single shoe, the 'Cinderella Murder' of the tabloids - by reuniting the suspects on camera, from Susan's grieving mother and womanizing boyfriend to the now-famous director she was auditioning for, her former roommates, a tech billionaire who was her classmate, and the computer-science professor who taught them both.