Number 11 is a book by I read back in the 80’s and took over twenty years to find. It’s titled A Perilous Affair and it is a Candlelight Supreme written by Linda Randall Wisdom. When I started searching for it, I couldn’t remember the name, only the plot. I found a list of all the Candlelight Supreme’s and one by one I looked up each one until I discovered mine…at number 173!
So what is this elusive book about? It’s about an agent named Alicia who falls in love with her partner, Reid. Reid and Alicia plan to retire and marry, but their boss isn’t willing to let his two best agents go, so he sends her into an impossible situation where her cover is blown and she lands in a dark dungeon at the mercy of some sadistic dictator’s hands. When she is rescued, she is so badly damaged that the boss tells Reid that Alicia died. The truth is that she is a witness to the dictator’s cruelty, and so she has to “die”.
She is reborn as Mari Chandler and is sent off to the USA as store owner in North Carolina . And for three years Reid has believed the one true love of his life is dead.
They both want to put their past love behind them so they both end up at the same resort in Mexico where Reid proposed to Alicia, and low and behold, they wind up falling in love again!
To read this book now, in 2012, it’s totally unrealistic in parts. They went to all this trouble to bury her identity and when the bad guy Dictator shows up they let her “handle” it on her own. They talk about East Germany and Yugoslavia, and no uses a cell phone!
But the realism of this book isn’t what I’m writing about. What makes this book so romantic is the heartbreak meltdown that Reid has when he’s told Alicia died. His pain and sorrow is felt through the whole book. It tugs on my heartstrings each time I pick it up to read.
It is now sold through Amazon Digital Services for Kindle and has a new cover, so it would be interesting to read the outdated and antiquated “spy” world from 1987 with a 2012 cover…because I must say, it is a hot cover! But I’ll stick with my paperback with the old cover. It’s kind of like a fine wine.
No comments:
Post a Comment