GONE BY MORNING

Two women who share a relationship so secret that one of them doesn’t know about it hunt a killer who will stop at nothing to preserve his own secret.

Even under normal circumstances, nobody much cares when a call girl is killed. So the NYPD’s indifference to the murder of Sharon Williams is no surprise, especially since her corpse is found the morning after out-of-town sociopath Jackson Mattingly plants a pair of bombs in the subway stations at Times Square and Penn Station that leave dozens dead and paralyze the city. But even though she barely avoided becoming a victim of the Subway Bomber herself, retired madam Kathleen Harris cares more about Sharon, a former employee who called her wanting to meet shortly before she was spirited away from outside the building Kathleen owns. She asks Emily Silverman, a neighbor in her apartment building whom she helped get a plum job in Mayor Derick Sullivan’s press office, to find out more about the case. But there's something Kathleen isn't telling Emily: that she’s Emily’s grandmother, a one-time crack addict who spent five years in prison. Emily doesn’t know about Kathleen because her own mother, divorce attorney Lauren Cintron, slammed the door on the mother she’s convinced abandoned her and doesn't know Kathleen has wormed her way into Emily’s life. As Kathleen and Emily struggle to trace Sharon’s last movements, they have no idea that her death is about to lead to a high-profile crime that will make headlines all over the city and send Kathleen back to jail.

Mary Higgins Clark with teeth, even if the biggest surprises come early on.