I have to say I was disappointed in this book by Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter Carol Higgins Clark. I received it as a Christmas gift and finished it so that if asked, I could say I did. If I hadn't gotten it as a gift, I probably wouldn't have finished it.
The characters were not very well developed. The main character Alvirah was more developed than the others, though I knew about her as I'd read another Higgins book where she was the sleuth.
There was a mother/daughter team and it took me three to four chapters to get which one was the mother and which the daughter. I can't even figure out why the mother and father were in the book. The daughter's last name was Reilly and so was her fiance's last name Reilly. This makes four characters with the last name Reilly and none of them with outstanding physical characteristis or personalities that might differebtate them from each other,
I like bad guys who are bad. Now, I realize this is a cozy, but these are supposed to be hardened criminals. One of them did twelve years in prison. Yet they didn't respond with the vitriol real criminals would have responded with. I got that one of them was incredibly stupid and that stupidity saved one of his victims from a hoirrible fate. But that trick only works once and it was over used in this book.
The whole premise is that the really bad bad guy (not the truly stupid one) is getting out of prison having seved twelve years after swindling a lot of seniors and others out of their life savings. He's never let on where he hid the money. He actually converted it into diamonds which he then put in a flask and tied to the branch of a blue spruce in Stowe, Vt. He's now out, the tree has grown and it's about to be cut down to be the tree at Rockerfeller Center in New York City. The premise didn't work for me. I could think of no reason why a criminal would do that. There are a gazillion places that would be better to hide diamonds.
I don't recommend this book.
