THE PLOT
Over the past year Allison’s marriage to her childhood love, Bart Allan, has been a “blast.” Literally. She’s lived through terrorists and madmen, murder and mayhem—all in the name of love and her job as Bart’s partner in Interpol’s anti-terrorist organization, Anastasia.
But Allison’s adventures are just beginning. At the moment, she’s in Sri Lanka, trying to find Bart, who disappeared two months ago. There’s just one little problem: an untimely fall from an elephant has left her with a very big case of amnesia. How can she save her husband when she doesn’t even remember who he is?
This is Allison’s most exciting adventure yet as she tangles with the Tamil Tigers, a group of revolutionaries who are orchestrating a civil war in Sri Lanka and smuggling sapphires out of the country to fund their cause. Then there’s Oz Barlow, who claims to be her husband. Will he tell her the truth and help her find Bart?
ABOUT THE BOOK
With each previous book, I’ve spent many hours or days on location, soaking up the atmosphere, prying into nooks and crannies to discover the fun, interesting and exciting places that give that city or area its special ambience.
I was scheduled to spend 21 days in Thailand and Sri Lanka researching this book. Using travel books and brochures (this was before Google) I researched the locations I thought would be the most exciting for the story.
Then terrible fires raged throughout Indonesia and Malaysia, blanketing Southeast Asia area with thick smoke. Planes crashed, ships collided, hundreds of people died, and thousands were hospitalized. My trip was cancelled. But my daughter, Shelley, and son, Greg, have frequent opportunities to travel to both Thailand and Sri Lanka in their jobs, so I told them where the action was to take place and they took the pictures I needed. The sights, sounds, smells, animals, and many of the people in the book are straight off the streets of those exotic places, thanks to my son and daughter.
Ananda, the taxi driver in Colombo, Sri Lanka, who drove Shelley five hours into the mountains to check a manufacturing plant, asked why she needed some of the pictures she was taking. When she told him her mother was a writer and she was taking pictures for me, he told her he wanted to be in the book. So he is.
The monitor lizard that appears later in the novel was encountered by Greg near the Dondra Head Lighthouse as he stopped to take pictures for me at that location. Both Shelley and Greg have been in Colombo during or immediately after attacks on the city by the Tamil Tigers. All the information on the rebel fighting is right out of their journals or the newspapers. My thanks to Shelley and Greg for their extra efforts to make my details right, and for all the additional material I could never have gleaned from travel books.
THE PLOT
Newlyweds need time together, but Allison and Bart both work for Anastasia, an undercover anti-terrorist organization, and finding time alone is next to impossible.
While Bart is on a secret mission in Africa, Allison arrives home one day to a cryptic message: Anastasia under attack. Get out of the house now. Disappear. Take nothing.
The other members of Anastasia have already fled and Allison must find a way to survive. With only a few months of training, how can she outwit and outrun a group of hired assassins?
Fasten your seat belt and join Allison for one of the wildest rides of her life as she travels across the country with a small package that could mean life or death – depending on who gets it first.
ABOUT THE BOOK
This was a fun book to write as I incorporated my “home territory” of Quartz Hill, California, as well as research I had already done on Amethysts. Doing things on your own is much easier than if you are accompanied by a child. Having Allison running alone might have been a piece of cake for her, but to have the responsibility of protecting a child in danger is one thing, and then a reluctant, rebellious teenager is quite another.
When my husband and I visited the area in South Carolina described here, we fell in love with it. The picture on the cover is one I took of the ruins of the lovely old Church of Prince William’s Parish that had been burned in the Revolutionary War in 1779 by the British, rebuilt, burned by the Federal Army in the Civil War in 1865. It was early morning and the mist still hung over the grounds and wound through the old twisted oaks that dripped with Spanish moss. I knew when I saw it, it was the perfect place for a mystery.
