Crime queen Mary Higgins Clark wants it known that she doesn't completely invent the creeps she writes about in her novels. You know the ones — they kidnap children, bludgeon teen-age girls, stalk single women.

        “I read papers from all over the country and clip out stories that interest me,” she says. “I do a lot of research, then take the ingredients of the case and write a novel around them.”

Daddy's Little Girl

By Mary Higgins Clark    Simon & Schuster; $26; 291 pages

        Incredibly successful novels. Lifetime sales in excess of 70 million. Twenty-three novels on national bestseller lists. Eighteen made into feature films or TV movies.

        And here she goes again, stirring ingredients from reality into Daddy's Little Girl. It's based on the case of Edgar Smith, who in the 1970s bludgeoned a teen-age girl to death, then spent 14 years in prison saying he was innocent and lining up influential supporters. He finally was paroled and six years later attempted the same crime. This time, the woman escaped, testified and he's back in prison.

        “I have 15 years of newspaper clippings on that case alone,” she says.

        It's on these clips that Ms. Clark hangs Daddy's Little Girl, the story of Ellie Cavanaugh, whose 15-year-old sister Andrea was murdered by Rob Westerfield 23 years ago. After 22 years in prison, all the while insisting on his innocence, he's paroled.

        At that point, Ellie, an investigative reporter in Atlanta, quits her job, moves back to her hometown and murder scene Oldham-on-the-Hudson, and sets about using her reporting skills to prove Westerfield guilty.

        Here's the rub: Westerfield is the child of wealth and power, born into a family that pretty much owns Oldham. By the time Ellie arrives, he's already produced a witness with new information, accused someone else of the murder and is busily enlisting the support of Oldham's power structure, including the police.

        Ellie knows he's guilty but readers don't — and that's where Ms. Clark ushers in the suspense that pushes readers to the edge of their seats.

        Did Westerfield “buy” this new witness? And Paulie, the guy he's accusing, certainly isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer but he had the opportunity and a crush on Andrea — and a teacher remembers telling the class about Andrea, and Paulie saying “I didn't think she was dead.”

        And who is stalking Ellie? Breaking into her room, rifling her papers, vandalizing her car, making nasty phone calls, even trying to drive her off the road? Or could Ellie be inventing the stalker? The Oldham cops think so, and Ms. Clark is devious enough to make readers at least wonder. Especially given Ellie's iffy emotional state.

        Deserted by her father after Andrea's murder and raised by a single mother who died of complications related to alcoholism, Ellie's emotional roller coaster makes the novel more character driven than the usual mystery. Sure, events advance the plot, but it's Ellie's range of close-to-the-surface emotions and her response to them that gives the novel its depth. That and Ms. Clark's use of subtlety to worry readers over what might or might not happen.

        “I love Hitchcock, because of the implied threat,” she says. “The footsteps on the stairs, the shadow on the wall, that sort of thing.

        “I grew up listening to radio drama where you had to use your imagination. Just that threat would scare you, even if nothing happened. Those footsteps on the stairs again. I strive to get that into my books.”

        And she succeeds.

       Mary Higgins Clark signs Daddy's Little Girl 2 p.m. Wednesday at Kroger's Northgate Mall store, 9690 Colerain Ave., Bevis; and noon Thursday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Rookwood Pavilion, Edwards and Madison Roads, Norwood.

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