A Cold Wind from the Andes
by David Osborn
Kelly Anders, financially successful writer of best-selling romantic fiction, lives a privileged but sterile existence in a Manhattan penthouse. Pushed into a book tour of Britain by her publisher, Kelly dreads a politically orchestrated meeting with Rachel Sommerset, the acclaimed Nobel Prize–winning novelist, her generation’s Tolstoy. The encounter, while leading to a surprising friendship between the two women, dredges up the ghosts of Kelly’s past—her unacknowledged youth with a different name in the impoverished inner city and her ambivalent feelings toward her husband, Gerald, now hidden away in her penthouse in a permanent coma, the fallout of an ugly kidnapping in Argentina of himself, the mining corporation head he worked for, along with the man’s consort, Teresa, and Jake, a renowned photographer. Their lives changed forever by their brutal captors, Jake and Teresa, in their struggle to right themselves, find their way together in the world, while unified with them through their shared experience and strengthened by the bond she’d built with Rachel, Kelly begins to reassess her career and her life in an ultimate quest for redemption.
Selected praise:
“An exciting, highly plausible Washington thriller …”
“No better example of absorbing, fast-paced intrigue. Compelling to the last punctuation mark.”
“Breathless introduction to the inner workings of big business …”
“This well-plotted thriller makes compulsive holiday reading.”
“As commercial and exciting a novel as can be found today.… It is shocking, savage, and graphic, a cruel book that spares little in detail. There is unbearable suspense, headlong action, and ends with a final ironic twist that will leave the reader gasping. Osborn is a master storyteller and his remorseless style matches his remorseless narrative.…”
“This is a first-class book. It has what one admires so often in English thrillers and finds so seldom in American ones: literate, accomplished writing which makes the plot more ingenious, the characterizations more deft and engaging, and therefore the thrills more thrilling.…”
