The story revolves around Dana Evans,a young Washington TV journalist who's recently returned to Washington from the Balkans, where she adopted a handicapped war orphan who's having trouble adjusting to life in America.Dana Evans' character made a first appearance in Sidney Sheldon's previous book - The Best Laid Plans.She is a beauty with brains.

Her job lets Dana to follow the news all over the world, from Washington to Aspen, Nice,Juneau, Dusseldorf, Rome, Brussels, Moscow, and Siberia. Each of these brief visits is like a postcard- a local landmark or two, an interesting local restaurant and another piece of the puzzle,which has to do with why every member of a venerable, old Washington dynasty has died a violent death in the last year.

It seems strange that in a media-savvy city like Washington, no one but Dana has noticed there's a pattern in the rapid extinction of the Winthrops or even whispered the words family vendetta.But that's why pretty, young girl TV reporters were invented, at least by the Author. As Dana sets out to investigate the distinguished career of the Winthrop family patriarch, her lover Jeff, a sports anchor at her TV station, is called away to administer aid and succor to his former wife, a beautiful model who's realised,too little and too late, that she never should have dumped him.

And Kemal, the 12 years old orphan, is being drugged by his baby sitter, who's in cahoots with at least one set of bad guys. Dana hasn't noticed how tractable the temperamental boy has become recently because she's been disguising like dressing up as a Russian tramp to infiltrate a secret weapons base in Siberia and stuff.

But all's well that ends well, as it usually does for Sheldon's heroines, and in the meantime you've learned where the five-star hotels are and what to order in a famous restaurant in Rome. A slick,commercial, slightly thin tale told by a craftsman of the genre,Sydney Sheldon


About the Author

The late Sidney Sheldon, 1917-2007, Born in Chicago, Sheldon entered Northwestern University on a scholarship in 1935, but was soon forced to drop out by the economic hardships of the Depression.

He went to Manhattan in hopes of becoming a songwriter, but decided to try the west coast where he was hired as a reader by Universal Studios. He had managed to break into screenwriting on a modest basis when World War II broke out, but the Army Air Force quickly discharged him for medical reasons.

After attempting to write musicals and comedies for the New York stage, Sheldon returned to Hollywood. His acclaim as a scriptwriter was capped by the Oscar he won for the screenplay of The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer (RKO, 1947.

The following year, Sheldon collaborated with Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett on the script for the highly successful MGM musical, Irving Berlin's Easter Parade.

That script earned him the Screen Writers Guild award for best musical of the year, as did Sheldon's adaptation of Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun in 1950. he has also won a Tony Award for the book for the musical, Redhead, and an Edgar for the best mystery novel of 1970, The Naked Face.

Sheldon wrote his first book at age fifty-three and has also written and produced several successful television series, including "The Patty Duke Show,"I Dream of Jeannie," and "Hart to Hart.". One of the world's best-selling writers, Sheldon decided to try writing a novel when he got an idea that he could not adapt to a play or a screenplay.