Reviews for All Dressed In White

by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Producer-investigator Laurie Moran has found the perfect mystery for her hit crime-solving reality show, Under Suspicion the case of Amanda Pierce, the runaway bride. Five years previously, Amanda disappeared the night before her wedding day, and now her mother thinks TV exposure just may be the way to find out at last what happened and why. Was it Amanda's jealous sister? Her fiancé's Leopold and Loeb-like groomsmen? Or the fiancé himself, who suspiciously married Amanda's best friend, Meghan, soon after Amanda disappeared? In spite of a promising start, Laurie's interrogation of the wedding party as they re-create the event in Palm Beach produces rather thin, unconvincing motives, which Laurie and her lawyer-boyfriend, Alex, hash and rehash, slowing the pace and making the characters feel underdeveloped. Digressions concerning Laurie's family and personal life, including her love of her son and father, who travel with her to the shoot, don't help much and further slow the narrative. The budding romance between Laurie and Alex, though a lovely courtship, intervenes in the strangest moments, which only further sunders what fragile tension exists. Still, the genuinely gripping finish at least partially offsets the meandering storytelling. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The first-time collaboration of mystery grande dame Clark and thriller star Burke will definitely draw readers, though the book itself may disappoint both authors' fans.--Grant, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Laurie Moran and the crew of Under Suspicion (The Cinderella Murder, 2014, etc.) revisit the 5-year-old case of the bride who vanished hours before she was supposed to walk down the aisle. Despite some understandable last-minute jitters on both sides, Amanda Pierce had been looking forward eagerly to joining hands in marriage with attorney Jeff Hunter at the splishy Grand Victoria Hotel in Palm Springs. Instead she went down in tabloid history as the runaway bride who disappeared the night before the ceremony. Now her mother, Sandra Pierce, wants Under Suspicion, which specializes in dramatizing, and incidentally solving, cold cases on television, to reopen the mystery. Producer Laurie gets Walter Pierce, Sandra's workaholic ex, on board, along with bridesmaids Kate Fulton, Meghan White, and Charlotte Pierce, the bride's older sister, and groomsmen Nick Young, Austin Pratt, and Henry Pierce, the bride's brother. Complications have already arisen before the Under Suspicion crew even arrives in Florida. Jeff is now married to Meghan, whom he had dated briefly before she introduced him to Amanda back at Colby College, the school the wedding party had all attended. Bill Walker, the wedding photographer, suddenly recalls that the police never questioned his intern, Jeremy Carroll, who, then as now, seemed a little bit off. Laurie can't quite satisfy herself why Amanda would have left her modest belongings to Sandra Pierce, Henry's daughter, but her $2 million trust fund to the fiance she'd just gotten to sign a prenup. And news about the strangling of Colby student Carly Romano back in the wedding party's college days hangs like a dark cloud over the increasingly tense Grand Victoria. Methodical, efficient, brand-name genre thrills guaranteed not to frighten the horses. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.