Customer Reviews

All Through the Night

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

"All through the Night" is a nice Christmas story with a happy ending. It is easy to read and entertaining. If you like Alvirah and Willy, go for it. If you prefer murder and breathtaking suspense, read one of Mary Higgins Clark's earlier novels.

If you are looking for guts, gore and grit, look elsewhere. This is a mystery without a dead body. It pulls at the heart strings, and brings back my favourite Clark characters, Willy and Alvirah, who I can't get enough of. This is one of the fastest reads I have experienced, but it was heart-warming and perfect for the holiday season

This is a fantastic read. Short, but one of her best. Two sub-plots that do not hinder the other, tied together by a little girl named Star. The whole setting is easy to believe, so you can easily let yourself flow with the story. And it does flow; you will not wish to put it down. There are a couple things that are just too convient. But I guess you would need a much longer book to fit everything in. A good read for Christmas.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Alvirah and Willy make a great team, and since I am Catholic, I enjoy anything when somebody is trying to help the Catholic church. I was so angry when the theft was committed! No one should steal anything sacred from a church!
This book is best read at Christmas time. I know that next Christmas, I am very likely to read them again!

Mary Higgins Clark can't need the money. I thought the Lottery Winner was awful. Then she wrote The Christmas Box and I thought "Yikes, what drivel!. This NEW Holiday book is FAR and away her worst book and that is a distinction in of itself.

I am a big fan of Mary Higgins Clark and I look forward to each novel she writes. I was very disappointed this time. We knew what was happening from the beginning not her usual twisting plot, page turning, keep you up all night suspense novel. I love Willie and Elvirah but it's time for something new. Are we getting lazy since the marriage??

If you are looking for a murder, dead body, guts spilling type of mystery, look somewhere else, this is more a fairy tale happening in New York city type of mystery. Includes an abandoned baby, a building and a will, a criminal, and the one who raised the baby. Also a priest, some nuns, and the biological mother of the baby among others.
It is charming and an easy to read novel. No true suspense, but more of a hope it all ends well type of book. You are left to wonder how can there be people like that; stealing a baby, wanting to use the little girl for money/drug dealings, a couple doing everything in their power to take a house away from a nun-run day care center, etc. Also there is the mystery of the missing chalice! But then you realize that we all have angels, and the only way that you can explain that this book has a nice ending is because of them.
There are books which you think you will want to read again, this is not one of them.

All Through the Night
Mary Higgins Clark
Rebekah Sexton

Of the twelve Mary Higgins Clarks books I've had the privilege of reading, I've found All Through the Night to be among her best. Mary Higgins Clark ingeniously intertwines two plots through one little girl. Sondra's musical career and life hold a promising future for her as her dreams are slowly unfolding, until she becomes pregnant by mistake. She finds herself in a situation she doesn't know how to solve and determines that the only solution to her problem is to leave her newborn girl on the doorstep of a church in New York City. When Sondra returns seven years later in search of her daughter, she tragically finds that her daughter was never found and that the same night she left her, there was a burglary at the church. Left heartbroken, Sondra is left with questions that cannot be answered.
When Kate tragically discovers that her recently deceased sister, Bessie, left the will for her house to go to a couple she wasn't fond of, she becomes tragically aware of her sister's deceitfulness, something her friends were also unaware of. Positive that the will must be fraud, Alvirah, a close friend to Kate and Bessie, sets out to prove that the will is a fraud and that the Bakers are con artists. As Alvirah unfolds the mysteries of the events that happened the night that Sondra left her daughter at the church and of Bessie's will, the story unfolds plots and mysteries that leads one on a ride full of twists and surprises. Clark has once again outdone herself in All Through the Night.

I'm sure that Mary Higgins Clark no longer needs the money, but she could at least give her fans an unpredictable novel that doesn't insult our intelligence. I suspected how this book would end from page 1, but read the whole thing anyway in hopes that I might be surprised in some way. Not only was I disappointed, but I came away angry at the oversimplified plot, at the Meehans for being the most annoying crime solving couple in literary history, and at the idea that a woman who abandons her baby outdoors in the dead of winter has a right to come back and lay claim to that child seven years later. I expected better from this author and it'll be a long time before I read anything by her again.

I have read several of Mary Higgins Clark's longer novels. "All Through the Night" is a Christmas story featuring Alvirah and Willy Meehan, Clark's recurring characters. This story is not meant to be up to par with her longer novels, and the readers who have complained that it wasn't long enough fail to realize that Clark was commissioned to write a Christmas story only. Alvirah Meehan solves two mysteries; one concerning a missing baby left in front of a church 7 years earlier, and the other concerning a phony will. I enjoyed the story, especially during this time of the year.