Two Little Girls in Blue by Mary Higgins Clark

 Margaret and Steve Frawley return home from a party after a disturbing phone call from their babysitter to find their daughters Kelly and Kathy have become the victims of a kidnapping. The kidnapper, who calls himself the Pied Piper, and his two henchmen demand a ransom for the safe return of the girls. But the panicked parents can’t afford to pay the ransom on their own and so begins the descent into deceit.

This is the first Mary Higgins Clark book I’ve read in a long time. The first book I ever read by her was about a woman who solves a crime, almost becomes the criminal’s next victim, and is saved by her love interest… I read two more books by her and was disappointed to find they followed the same formula. So imagine my surprise when I cracked this novel open and found a book that didn’t follow that formula.

This is less of a mystery, the identities of the kidnappers are revealed pretty early on, and more of a thriller as the FBI attempts to track down the girls before something worse happens to them. While the subject of kidnapping is kind of dark, I would still classify this as light reading. There’s nothing really groundbreaking here and it isn’t written in a way to make it scary. It does offer a bit of suspense to keep you invested in finding out what happens next, and MHC was a skillful enough writer to keep me guessing right up until the end.

While I probably won’t ever call myself a hardcore Higgins Clark fan, I enjoyed this book enough to consider reading another at some point.