The background of the book

When Mary Higgins Clark, America’s queen of thriller, bought a summer home in Spring Lake, New Jersey, she had no idea it would provide the inspiration for her twenty-fourth novel. But as the renovation work began, she discovered that the deceased owner’s maiden name had been Eleanor Higgins, and it set her thinking. “I’m Mary Higgins Clark. Absolutely no relation. ‘But I began to wonder what would happen if, by coincidence a woman bought her great-great-grandmother’s house…” One thought led to another, and before long Mary Higgins Clark had her plot worked out and had decided that Spring Lake would be the setting for her novel. ‘As it turned out, the house triggered the book and the book paid for the house’.

While carrying out her research she was particularly pleased to incorporate two personal interests into the storyline: her love for history and her enjoyment of diaries. ‘I found old newspapers and old memoirs, and that made it so much more interesting to do the 1890s. I sometimes wish I had been born then’. On the street where you live is about a 19th century serial killer who seems to have returned to life. ‘I don’t believe in reincarnation’, the author says, ‘but i do believe that somehow psychic coincidence could happen.’

( A photograph of Mary Higgins Clark in Spring Lakes)