Deck the Halls

Combining Carol Higgles Clark’s ongoing central character, the young and feisty Regan Reilly, and Mary Higgins Clark’s Willy and Alvirah, featured earlier in the bestsellers The Lottery Winner and All Through the Night, the story begins when Regan’s businessman father Luke Reilly goes missing just before Christmas, held hostage for ransom by his partner’s angered and disinherited son.

Regan turns for help to her parents’ Central Park South neighbors, Willy and Alvirah, with whom she shares not only a talent for detection, but an unusually accommodating genius of a dentist who brings them together. Together, as New York City prepares for Christmas, the three of them join forces to find Luke, only to discover that he is not just missing, but kidnapped, along with the driver of the taxi in which he was riding, a Hispanic single mother of two.