Carol Higgins Clark. Burned. New York: Scribner, 2005. Print.
Mary Higgins Clark is known for her detective thrillers. Her daughter Carol learned at her feet. The novels may be formulaic, but they are fun.
Burned takes place in Hawaii, mostly near Waikiki with a couple of side trips to the Big Island. A publicist recently hired by a prestigious beach hotel turns up dead, apparently an accidental drowning, and wearing a necklace that used to belong to the Hawaiian royal family. This shell lei had been missing for thirty years, and it shows up on this dead woman the same week that a small local museum is auctioning off its mate.
Private detective Regan Reilly is spending a long weekend at the hotel to meet her friend Kit. Regan is engaged, and Kit thinks that she also may have found “Mr. Right.”
Will, the hotel manager, ends up hiring Regan to look into Dorinda the publicist’s death. Besides Kit and her boyfriend Steve, Regan connects with a variety of characters, all either employees or guests of the hotel. Among them are the Lucky Seven, a group chosen by lottery every year to visit Hawaii from a rain-soaked town near the Oregon coast.
There is a lot of action: kidnapping, play-acting, surfing, and the lei is stolen again. The points of view are varied; it may be necessary to make a list to keep everyone straight. The chapters are short and full of action, making the reader keep turning the pages.
As I write this, it is snowing once again where I live. We just experienced the coldest February on record. We also have had over two feet of snow, less than Boston, but nearly all in the past month. Today a drive that usually takes me fifteen to twenty minutes took nearly two hours. Cars were skidding all over. Burned takes place in January. Regan’s hometown of New York and Kit’s home in Hartford are both snowed in. How nice it would be to be in Hawaii like them right about now.
Clark does get Hawaii. She clearly has visited the state. The details are genuine. Burned is fun if you like suspense and tropical paradises.