"A collection of Mary Higgins Clark's acclaimed short stories, with her most famous unfinished story finally completed.
From the first-ever published story (1956's 'Stowaway'), to classic 'Alvirah and Willy', 'My Gal Sunday' and many more, Death Wears a Beauty Mask and Other Storiesgives readers the chance to revisit the short story highlights from the prolific 'Queen of Suspense'. As a grand finale to this collection of previously published hits comes a brand-new novella showcasing the dazzling and dangerous world of high fashion in 1970s New York City: 'Death Wears a Beauty Mask'.
When Janice steps off the plane in New York City with her new husband Mike, she can barely contain her excitement knowing Alexandra is waiting at the gate. It's been nearly a year since Janice saw her glamorous, fashion model older sister, whose busy workload even kept her from attending Janice and Mike's wedding.
But when Alexandra doesn't meet them at the airport as promised, Janice begins to worry. Even worse, no one has seen or heard from the beautiful model since she returned from shooting a campaign in Europe for the latest in luxury cosmetics: Beauty Mask.
As Janice and Mike race around New York searching for clues, they are swept into the secretive world of modeling agents, fashion photographers, and high-stakes advertisers who are all as desperate as they are to find Alexandra, and learn the truth behind the Beauty Mask."
"The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The Corrections. Includes an interview with the author.
Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother – her only family – is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she’ll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world – including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong.
Jonathan Franzen’s Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters – Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers – and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time."
