Sky Is Falling - Large Print

If America had a monarchy, the charismatic Winthrop family would wear the royal crown. Then tragically, in the short space of a year, all five family members die under different but violent circumstances. Dana Evans, a beautiful , young TV anchorwoman, sense something more than a series of coincidental accidents. In her determination to find the answers, she travels to Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, coming ever closer to the dangerous truth. As the murderous evidence unfolds, Dana finds her own life and that of her young son in deadly jeopardy-and in an unexpecte turn she became the haunted.

Dana Evans, who made her first appearance in Sidney Sheldon's The Best Laid Plans, is a spunky, good-looking, young Washington TV journalist who's recently returned to the nation's capital from the Balkans, where she adopted a handicapped war orphan who's having trouble adjusting to life in America. But that doesn't keep Dana from following a story 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 (at least in the European venues), 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 Sheldon.

As Dana sets out to investigate the distinguished career of the Winthrop family patriarch, her lover Jeff, a sports anchor at her station, is called away to administer aid and succor to his former wife, a beautiful model who's realized, too little and too late, that she never should have dumped him. And Kemal, the 12-year-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 dressing up like a two-bit Russian tramp to infiltrate a secret weapons base in Siberia... Do you hear the words movie locations? 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. --Jane Adams