Let Me Whisper in Your Ear » (First Edition)

Mary Jane Clark is a producer and writer at CBS News. She lives in northern New Jersey.

There are some things nobody can possibly know...and others that nobody should dare to guess...

A pair of thrill-seeking boys crept into Palisades Park after dark to ride the Cyclone. When the roller coaster returned to the station, it was carrying only one child. What happened to the other would remain veiled in secrecy for the next three decades...

As a rising KEY News producer, Laura Walsh prepares video obituaries of famous people whose deaths seem imminent. But the macabre guessing game, and an eerily pre-taped obituary, plunge Laura into a chilling nightmare when one of her famous colleagues unexpectedly tumbles to her death from a Manhattan rooftop. Now Laura must delve into the dead woman's secret past— a past that holds a shocking connection to her own, and to a missing boy. Desperate to uncover the truth and unmask a cunning killer, Laura soon realizes with growing dread that the next obituary she should be writing is her own...

Kirkus Reviews

Everybody hates Gwyneth Gilpatric, and why not? The anchor of KEY television's Hourglass program has brains, looks, success, wealth, power-most of them handed to her on a platter. And some of her closest intimates have reasons of their own. Her plastic surgeon, Dr. Leonard Costello, is upset because she may spread the news of his Parkinson's. Kitzi Malcolm is jealous of the long, long hours her husband Joel, Gwyneth's executive producer, spends with his star. Hourglass ex-producer Mike Schultz resents the fall he took for Gwyneth's refusal to reshoot her standup footage on a drug story that revealed a leading informant standing in the background-an informant whose life Gwyneth's monster ratings did nothing to save. So it's no surprise when Gwyneth is tossed off the penthouse terrace at her own New Year's Eve party. As New York's finest sweat to reduce the suspect list from the size of the Manhattan White Pages, Hourglass's wholesome new associate producer Laura Walsh, who's not even working on the murder, discovers two unsettling facts: Gwyneth was somehow linked to a child's death 30 years ago aboard the Palisades Park's roller-coaster Laura's alcohol-ruined father once ran; and Laura herself has been named Gwyneth's principal legatee. The resulting mystery is about as subtle as the Anvil Chorus, and its unconnected subplots make it considerably less tidy.