Jack Higgins Books Into Movies

Beach Reads > Aug. 12

Mobbed. By Carol Higgins Clark. Scribner. Higgins Clark – who will appear this fall as the guest of the Ocean City Library’s Author’s Luncheon – long ago proved a worthy successor to the fiction empire of her famous mother, mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark. In this fast-paced novel, the 14th in the series about private investigator Regan Reilly, the heroine is visiting the Jersey Shore with her cop husband Jack when she’s caught up in the case of a missing actress, Cleo Paradise, who was being stalked by a fanatic who sent her dead flowers. With the help of her mystery-writer mother (Clark’s another one to borrow liberally from real life), Regan solves all the problems, unravels all the secrets, and puts together all the pieces. Hardly a work of art, and transparently plotted, but if your expectations are low it’s fun and a good beach book.

The Help. By Kathryn Stockett. Putnam. First published in February 2009, “The Help” became an instant bestseller, and still sits atop the New York Times list. It’s been made into a hotly anticipated movie with Emma Stone and Viola Davis. And it’s sparked its share of controversy, from critics who say a.) a white author cannot hope to interpret the experience of black women in the American South, and b.) the dialect of the black maids in this novel rival Margaret Mitchell’s for racism. Davis has even had to defend her choice to play the role of servant Aibileen in the new movie, because some people think black women simply shouldn’t be returned to those stereotypical roles. Whatever. Taken solely on its face, as the story of these women (not women in general or cultures as a whole), “The Help” truly satisfies. It tells the story of a privileged young white woman, Skeeter Phelan, in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, as the civil rights era simmers to a boil. Just out of college, Skeeter finds that the woman who raised her, Constantine, is no longer in her family’s employ, though no one will say why. She decides to write about the lives of “the help” – African-American domestics who work for the families of her friends. The maids agree to talk despite the risk, simply to articulate the stifling limits of their lives. Poignant and multi-layered, it’s the book of this year, last year, and years to come.

Dark Justice (Sean Dillon Series) - Jack Higgins

It is night in Manhattan. The President of the United States is scheduled to have dinner with an old friend, but in the building across the street, a man has disabled the security and stands at a window, a rifle in his hand. Fortunately, his attempt is not successful - but this is only the beginning. Someone is recruiting a shadowy network of agents with the intention of creating terror. Their range is broad, their identities masked, their methods subtle. White House operative Blake Johnson and his opposite number in British intelligence, Sean Dillon, set out to trace the source of the havoc, but behind the first man they find another, and behind him another still. And that man is not pleased by the interference. Soon he will target them all: Johnson, Dillon, Dillon’s colleagues. And one of them will fall...
Since The Eagle Has Landed—one of the biggest-selling thrillers of all time—every novel Jack Higgins has written has become an international bestseller. He has had simultaneous number-one bestsellers in hardcover and paperback, and many of his books have been made into successful movies, including The Eagle Has Landed, To Catch a King, On Dangerous Ground, Eye of the Storm, and Thunder Point. He has degrees in sociology, social psychology, and economics from the University of London, and a doctorate in media from Leeds Metropolitan University. A fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an expert scuba diver and marksman, Higgins lives in Jersey on the Channel Islands.

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