I'LL BE SEEING YOU

Welcome back to Clarkland, where the menace to young womanhood is piled on as thick as whipped cream, and where, this time, a TV reporter's investigation of a nefarious fertility clinic—and of her own family—is provoked by the street murder of a woman who looks like her identical twin. Meghan Collins's routine story on the Manning Clinic's in-vitro fertilization program turns nightmarish when clinic embryologist Helene Petrovic is shot dead—and then turns out to be not a doctor after all, but a cosmetologist (!) who may have mislabeled dozens of fertilized embryos that have now been implanted in mothers who think they're about to have their own biological children. Meanwhile, that unidentified body, who sure does look like Meghan, turns out to be her half-sister, and the suspected killer none other than Meghan's father Edwin, missing and presumed dead since his car supposedly plunged over the side of the Tappan Zee Bridge nine months ago. Worse, the police have linked Edwin to the Petrovic killing too, since his headhunting agency recommended Petrovic to the Manning Clinic. As Meghan uses her enforced time off from the Manning Clinic story to track down the second family Edwin kept in Arizona—and, she hopes, to establish his death and clear his name despite repeated indications that he's still alive—she's threatened by the likes of (1) Victor Orsini, the headhunting-agency associate who took a phone call from Edwin moments before the bridge accident; (2) Dr. Henry Williams, a fertility specialist who knows where Petrovic got the unexpectedly big estate she's left to the Manning Clinic, and what's become of her inconvenient Rumanian niece; and—just for good measure—(3) generic loony Bernie Heffernan, who's obsessed with following Meghan and videotaping her. Clark's customary mastery of pace slackens as she marks time, especially during Act Three, while you wait hopefully for all these plots to come together. They don't. But nobody will care. (Literary Guild Triple Selection for July)