True Crime meets fiction in “The Cinderella Murder” by Mary Higgins Clarke and Alafair Burke. As an updated version of a sleuth, protagonist Laurie Moran is neither a P.I. nor a police detective. She’s a television producer trying to sell her boss on the next episode of her investigative series “Under Suspicion,” a program which attempts to solve cold cases by interviewing all the suspects together in one setting. Despite the success of her pilot episode which both solved the murder and got good ratings, her boss still needs to be convinced.
For her second episode, Laurie has chosen a 20-year-old cold case: the murder of a brilliant and beautiful college student. Salacious details and big-name suspects make the case a great choice for ratings and viewership, but Laurie’s real motive is compassion for the victim’s mother, Rosemary, who has had to live with both the loss of her daughter as well as the heartache of not knowing what happened to her.
There are enough hints and threads revealed along the way to allow the reader the pleasure of trying to solve the case right along with Laurie.
As the pre-interviews get underway, Laurie is unaware that she has stirred the hornet’s nest. We are introduced to creepy, skin-crawling characters that Laurie and the crew of “Under Suspicion” do not know about. The reader has more than one “he’s behind the curtain” moment as they worry and wait for Laurie and her crew to discover the shadowy characters. The production team barely notices when a second murder takes place. It’s only when one of the production staff is beaten that Laurie and her team start to understand that there is more going on than they realized, and that they are in danger.
Higgins Clarke and Burke take their time unfolding the contours of this murder mystery, suspect by suspect, all the while introducing us to the permanent cast of characters for their new “Under Suspicion” mystery series. The slow roll-out gathers steam as Laurie works her way through each character, uncovering their secrets. There are enough hints and threads revealed along the way to allow the reader the pleasure of trying to solve the case right along with Laurie.
If you like your murder mysteries fast paced and gritty, your sleuths stylized and charismatic, this one might not be for you, but cozy mystery readers will love this approach. Laurie is an average working single mom rather than a superstar. Her own painful history – the murder of her husband at the hands of a stalker – sets the emotional background for all of her choices, relationships, and motivations throughout the book. Like the rest of us, she is trying to juggle work and home-life, worried about her son, struggling with her personal and professional decisions, trying to manage her staff, and hoping that everything will work out. She achieves her success through nothing more glamourous than hard work and determination. Like working parents everywhere, she is one of the true superheroes of our time.
Personally, I prefer my mysteries a little more “cozy”; more charm and less worry, more quirk and less mundane care. After all, I spend enough time trying to manage my own life and I pick up a book to escape all that. That said, I will read the next book in the series. Higgins Clarke and Burke have caught my attention enough to want to see where Laurie goes next in her career, but not enough to bump their book to the top of the pile on my nightstand.
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