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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 1998, 173 pages
Paperback:
Oct 1999, 206 pages
Another Christmas season mystery that will keep readers turning the pages -- all through the night.
A desperate mother. Her missing child. A stolen chalice.
With Silent Night, Mary Higgins Clark, America's own Queen of Suspense, gave her
readers their best Christmas present ever.
Now, with All Through the Night, she once again celebrates the Christmas
season with a tale of suspense that will keep readers turning the pages -- all through the
night.
At the center of the novel are two of Mary Higgins Clark's most beloved characters,
Alvirah, the lottery winner turned amateur sleuth, and her husband, Willy, both of them
caught up in a Christmas mystery that calls on all of Alvirah's deductive powers, as well
as Willy's world-class common sense.
The story begins when a young unmarried woman leaves her newborn child on the rectory
doorstep at a church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. At the same moment, inside the
church, a young man is stealing a treasured artifact, a chalice adorned with a single
star-shaped diamond. Both the infant and the chalice disappear.
Seven years later, a few weeks before Christmas, Alvirah and Willy are busy helping
Willy's sister Cordelia, a nun who runs a thrift shop that doubles as an after-school
shelter for neighborhood kids, prepare for the upcoming Christmas pageant. The future of
the shelter is threatened, however, when the city condemns the building for that use, and
it is further jeopardized when a nearby brownstone to which the shelter was to be moved
turns out to have been willed to a young couple who were tenants in the building. Alvirah
refuses to believe that the will is genuine and sets out to prove that the couple are con
artists. Soon she is involved in the mystery of the chalice and the child.
In All Through the Night, Mary Higgins Clark has fashioned a Christmas gift
for all her readers.
Prologue
There were twenty-two days to go before Christmas, but Lenny was doing his Christmas
shopping early this year. Secure in the knowledge that no one knew he was there, and
standing so still and quiet that he hardly could hear himself breathe, he watched from the
confessional as Monsignor Ferris went about the rounds of securing the church for the
night. With a contemptuous smile, Lenny waited impatiently as the side doors were checked
and the lights in the sanctuary extinguished. He shrank back when he saw the monsignor
turn to walk down the side aisle, which meant that he would pass directly by the
confessional. He cursed silently when a floorboard in the enclosure squeaked. Through a
slit in the curtain he could see the clergyman stop and tilt his head, as if listening for
another sound.
But then, as if satisfied, Monsignor Ferris resumed his journey to the back of the
church. A moment later, the ...
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