Author Mary Higgins Clark, 'Queen of Suspense,' dead at 92

NEW YORK (AP) — Mary Higgins Clark, the tireless and long-reigning “Queen of Suspense” whose tales of women beating the odds made her one of the world’s most popular writers, died Friday at age 92.Her publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced that she died of natural causes in Naples, Florida. She was always absolutely sure of what they wanted to read — and, perhaps more important, what they didn’t want to read — and yet she managed to surprise them with every book.”Widowed in her late 30s with five children, she became a perennial bestseller over the second half of her life, writing or co-writing “A Stranger Is Watching,” “Daddy’s Little Girl” and more than 50 other favorites. She also collaborated on several novels with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark.Mary Higgins Clark specialized in women triumphing over danger, such as the besieged young prosecutor in “Just Take My Heart” or the mother of two and art gallery worker whose second husband is a madman in “A Cry in the Night.” Clark’s goal as an author was simple, if rarely easy: Keep the readers reading.“You want to turn the page,” she told The Associated Press in 2013. “And then I thought: Suppose an innocent young mother is convicted of the deliberate murder of her two children; suppose she gets out of prison on a technicality; and then suppose seven years to the day, on her 32nd birthday, the children of her second marriage disappear.”In September 1974, she sent her agent a manuscript for “Die a Little Death,” acquired months later by Simon & Schuster for $3,000.