From Amazon.com
Diana Deverell was a U.S. Foreign Service officer in such places as San Salvador and Poland. So when she has the central character of her tough and moving debut thriller give us inside details of a State Department agency dedicated to fighting terrorists, they have the smack and tang of reality. Kathryn "Casey" Collins finds her work becoming personal and very dangerous when her renegade Polish intelligence agent-lover Stefan Krajewski appears to have been one of the 200-plus victims in the bombing of an airliner on the 10th anniversary of the Lockerbie massacre. When Casey tries to do some freelance digging, she somehow becomes one of the bad guys--targeted by the FBI for possible involvement in the bombing. Also hot on her trail are the terrorists themselves, looking for revenge for the role she and Stefan played in nabbing the original Lockerbie villains. Add to the mix an inscrutable Danish Lutheran priest and Army officer (known as Father-Major) now running a covert intelligence operation and you have a milieu worthy of the best of Len Deighton, if not John Le Carré. With those and other masters of the espionage genre making increasingly rare appearances these days, it's good to have someone as skilled as Deverell arriving so stylishly on the scene.
--Dick Adler
From Publishers Weekly
An overambitious attempt to meld a post-Cold War spy thriller and a star-crossed romance, Deverell's debut introduces us to Kathryn "Casey" Collins, a foreign service officer who enjoys a blissful?if hardly predictable or safe?relationship with Stefan Krajewski, a former infiltrator of the Polish secret police who's long worked undercover for Danish intelligence. When, on the anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, a flight Stefan may have taken explodes over the Atlantic, Casey doesn't know if her lover is dead or in hiding and goes to Denmark to investigate. Her snooping attracts the notice of the FBI and makes Casey herself a suspect in the bombing. Casey is forced to flee the country; when Stefan shows up alive, with an attractive female partner by his side, Casey must question how well she really knows her lover?even as she attempts to prove her innocence to the FBI by reeling in Kruger, a villainous, high-level former East German intelligence official. Deverell sets a number of promising story lines in motion: Stefan's shady background and mysterious parentage; Casey's status as a fugitive unsure who she can trust; and the suspense surrounding Kruger's nefarious schemes. It is disappointing that she doesn't linger long enough on any of these plot strands to generate compelling interest in them or in her characters. Agent, Nancy Yost.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
