There Was a Little Boy

Comparisons with Mary Higgins Clark's Where Are the Children? will be inevitable for this chilling first novel about the kidnapping of an infant and the suspicion that one of his parents may have been involved. Fourteen years after her son was stolen from his crib, Julie Layton has built a new life. Remarried and pregnant, she has not told her new husband about her past. Her lost child, unbeknownst to either of them, is one of her troublesome students in the innner-city school where she teaches. He still lives with the crazed Puerto Rican woman who abducted him and whom he believes to be his mother. The boy's father, a former drug addict and jazz musician who cracked emotionally after the kidnapping, has returned to try and find his son and reconcile his feelings about his ex-wife. Meanwhile, an unknown killer is murdering teachers at the school, making an already frightening environment almost unbearable. There is much more to this complicated tale, including a plethora of secondary characters who sometimes seem to exist only to suit the author's style of quick-cutting from one scene to another. While the narrative does not always move smoothly--two different novels seem to be vying for ascendancy here, and the reason Julie is on the killer's hit list is never quite clear--it constitutes a real page-turner that will keep readers focused on when and how the truth will be revealed, and whether the seemingly foreordained tragedy will occur. Literary Guild main selection; ABC-TV miniseries. (Oct.)