My name is Clare Carlson, and I’m the news director of Channel 10 News in New York City. Right now I’m sitting in a marketing meeting. Which (with the possible exception of a root canal) is my least favorite activity in the world. I am pretty good at this stuff though. My last marketing concept was to call ourselves “Go News.” The idea was to keep everyone on camera moving all the time – not sitting behind anchor desks but walking all over the set. Believe it or not, our ratings soared. It’s things like this that can make or break a TV news executive.

I used to be a real journalist though.

A newspaper reporter.

A damn good newspaper reporter.

How good? Well, I won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about a missing 11-year-old girl named Lucy Devlin who disappeared on her way to school one morning and was never found. My articles about her provided “dramatic, haunting and extraordinarily compassionate coverage of a breaking deadline news story.” I didn’t say that. The Pulitzer committee did in giving me the prize.

But then the newspaper I worked for went out of business, and I wound up as a TV reporter. I wasn’t very good at that. People said I came across on the air as too intense, too unlikeable. So the station gave me a job in management instead (I was never quite sure I understood the logic of that) and that’s how I wound up as the news director. Go figure.

Sitting in this meeting at the moment though, my mind really isn’t on marketing strategies.

It’s on a story.

The same story I won the Pulitzer for.

The disappearance of little Lucy Devlin.

It’s the 15th anniversary of that sensational story and all of the media – including Channel 10 – is telling all over again the tragic account of the little girl who went off to school one morning and simply vanished.

A lot has happened to me since the Lucy Devlin story first happened. Personally, as well as professionally. I’ve been married three times, but none of them lasted very long. My husbands all said I was too obsessed with my job and spent all my time in the newsroom, instead of at home with them. I suppose they’re right. My last husband even had our divorce papers sent to me at Channel 10 to make sure I got them. I was directing coverage of a high-rise fire when the envelope arrived. I didn’t open it until the fire was out. The bottom line is that I’m not that same person I was 15 years ago when I won the Pulitzer for the Lucy Devlin disappearance story.

But now I’ve made a momentous decision.

I want to go back and cover the story myself for our stuff about the 15th anniversary of the Lucy Devlin case. I want to be a real reporter on this one and start digging into all the details of that long-ago day all over again. If there are more answers to what happened to Lucy out there somewhere after all this time, I want to be the one to find them. All my old reporting instincts kicked in for me. Old habits die hard, I guess

You see, I have a lot invested in the Lucy Devlin story

It was the biggest story of my life.

The story that made me a media superstar and catapulted me to the position I have today.

The story I never finished.

So, while everyone else in the meeting was still talking about marketing surveys and ad demographics, I called up on my laptop an old newspaper story I’d written 15 years ago right after Lucy Devlin disappeared. I looked at the picture of Lucy that ran with it. An adorable 11-year-old girl with a big smile on her face in that old photo. A happy little girl with no clue of whatever terrible things were about to happen to her.

One of the first rules a journalist like me learns is to never get personally involved in a story. You always have to keep up an emotional wall between you and the people you cover. Otherwise, the job will eat you up alive. That’s a rule I learned a long time ago. But here’s the other thing about that rule. It doesn’t always work. Sooner or later, a story comes along that’s so big and powerful for you that it sucks you in emotionally and becomes personal. That’s what happened with me and Lucy Devlin.

Now it was time for me to go back and find out what really happened to Lucy. . .

You can read more about Clare in Yesterday’s News, the first book in the NEW “Clare Carlson” mystery series.

A classic cold case reopened―along with Pandora’s box

When eleven-year-old Lucy Devlin disappeared on her way to school more than a decade ago, it became one of the most famous missing child cases in history. The story turned reporter Clare Carlson into a media superstar overnight. Clare broke exclusive after exclusive. She had unprecedented access to the Devlin family as she wrote about the heartbreaking search for their young daughter. She later won a Pulitzer Prize for her extraordinary coverage of the case.

Now Clare once again plunges back into this sensational story. With new evidence, new victims, and new suspects―too many suspects. Everyone from members of a motorcycle gang to a prominent politician running for a US Senate seat seem to have secrets they’re hiding about what really might have happened to Lucy Devlin. But Clare has her own secrets. And, in order to untangle the truth about Lucy Devlin, she must finally confront her own torturous past.

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About the author
R.G. Belsky is an author of crime fiction and a journalist in New York City. His newest mystery, Yesterday’s News, was published in May 2018 by Oceanview. It is the first in a series featuring Clare Carlson, the news director for a New York City TV station. He previously wrote the Gil Malloy series for Atria about a tabloid newspaper reporter. Belsky himself has been a top editor at the New York Post (where he helped create the famous “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline), the New York Daily News, Star magazine and NBC News. Two earlier Belsky thrillers that came out in the ‘90s – Loverboy and Playing Dead – were re-released by Harper Collins recently in ebook form for the first time. Visit R.G. at rgbelsky.com.

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