the book was a little slow however i was needing to know what happened and keeped reading. ( )

This is the first Sidney Sheldon book I've read. It was good ... reminded me of a Mary Higgins Clark book, really. The only issue I really had was where she is flying all over the place, investigating, and her employers don't even really question her about it. But, maybe that's how it is. I also thought the "boyfriend's ex-wife" subplot was pretty superfluous. In fact, the boyfriend himself was pretty superfluous. But, I'd read more of his books. ( )

The characters are cardboard, and much of the plot is predictable. Dead bodies are piling up right and left, yet only spunky anchorwoman Dana Evans thinks something's fishy and investigates. She naively trusts everyone even as more people wind up dead. Typical Sidney Sheldon - yet I was riveted. ( )

Ok. I'd never read a book by Sheldon before, but I've seen them for sale
for years. My neighbor loaned me one and I decided to give it a try. The
"critics" (who are these people anyway?) on the back cover just raved and
raved, calling Sheldon a "master storyteller," "Sheldon has no peer," etc.
Okay, they convinced me, so I read it.

This story is about a news anchor in Washington named Dana Evans (who is
drop dead gorgeous, sweet as sugar pie, conscientious as she can be, and as
dumb as a sack of hammers) who begins to ask questions about the mysterious
deaths of an entire family. The Winthrop's are as close to royalty as
America has, and in the course of twelve short months, every single one of
them meets an "accidental" death. Okay, that's the whole plot. She
uncovers this conspiracy that involves Russia and a whole shit load of high
ranking people all over the world, endangering her own life and the life of
the poor Yugoslavian orphan boy with one arm that she adopted when she
covered the war in Sarajevo....

Yada, yada, yada..... (Yawn)

I didn't care one whit about any of these characters. The writing was
choppy and sloppy. Nothing was developed enough to make you give a crap
about it. The "bad guys" were obvious from the beginning.

Have you ever had a craving for a ham sandwich? You go into the kitchen and
get out the bread, the lettuce and the mayo, getting it all ready for the
meat. Then you discover that someone else ate all the ham except for one
tiny thin little piece of deli sliced ham...... You can put that on the
bread and eat it and it's *almost* a ham sandwich. If you work at it, you
might convince yourself that you are eating a ham sandwich. But your
stomach knows the difference. That's the way it was with this book. It's
*almost* a mystery. It looks like a book, you have to *read* it, like a
book. But after you finish it, you still feel like you need to read a
mystery because this just wasn't it.

I will NEVER pick up a Sidney Sheldon book again. ( )

Mein gott, what a crappy book.

Dana Evans is a t.v. news anchor/former war correspondant who starts investigating the Winthrop family deaths. Um, are t.v. news anchors moonlighting as investigative reporters nowadays? I don't think they're one in the same, are they? News anchors, as far as I know, are just the faces that come on t.v. and read the news. I don't think they often get out there and do some digging around, too. Anyway...

Kemal is kind of cool. He's Dana's foster son, a one-armed boy from Sarajevo. But he's pretty much a non-entity for most of the story.

I don't know why Jeff and Rachel are in the story... maybe to add some personal dilemma for Dana? If so, weak. The author should've just left them out and developed Dana and Kemal as characters more.

Dana thinks that a thief would be stupid to steal art because they'd get caught as soon as they re-sell it to a museum. Hello?! Art is stolen quite often. Have we not heard of underground collectors and the like? Art thiefs wouldn't be in "business" if they couldn't off their stuff somewhere.

Why is Dana the ONLY one who suspects foul play when five members of the same family die violent deaths within the space of a year? Even a lay-person would realize that the chances of that happening are astronomical. And then when another person associated with the family falls 30 stories to her death, and still only Dana suspects that something is up? Come on. An author shouldn't make his/her character seem bright by making EVERYONE else in the book an absolute moron.

The story finally got a bit more interesting in the last few chapters, but not really enough to redeem it. Pretty much a waste of time. ( )