The Winthrops are America's royal family, and its Prince Charming is the sexy, charismatic Gary Winthrop. Now the man on his way to becoming the Senate's brightest new star is found murdered in his home-the latest in a series of incidents that have killed five members of the family in a single year. One of the last people to see Gary Winthrop alive is Washington anchorwoman Dana Evans. She makes it her mission to investigate these seemingly random tragedies, little realizing that her search will sweep her across several continents, place her and her young son in grave danger, and lead her to a truth that will astound the world.
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
