Imposters (1985) and Outlaws (1987), like Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years, illustrate Higgins's effort to draw upon a broader social scale for his narratives. Imposters features Mark Baldwin, the wealthy head of a Boston media empire and his attempt to prevent the exposure of a set of complexly related crimes, some of them twenty years old. Outlaws depicts Terry Gleason's attempts to prosecute Sam Tibbetts, a renegade student radical. The Mandeville Talent (1991), which describes an investigation into a twenty-five-yearold murder and the involvement of organized crime in a land deal in western Massachusetts, also belongs in this group of novels that expands the social world of Higgins's fiction.