The Casanova Embrace

by Warren Adler

Overview

From the carcass of a Washington, D.C. car bomb explosion, the CIA launches an investigation into the mysterious events leading to the assassination of Chilean dissident and infamous casanova, Eduardo Allesandro Palmero.

As CIA investigator Alfred Dobbs rummages through the evidence, Palmero's mysterious life, from heir to the Chilean oligarchy to a fist-raising Marxist and trickster in disguise, comes to light. But what Dobbs soon discovers soars beyond his wildest imagination.

At the height of international terrorism, Eduardo fights his war with an unlikely weapon-seduction.

From Marie DeFarge to Frederika Millspaugh to Penny Anne McCarthy, Eduardo orders his sex-craving subjects into battle, tearing them from a life of tranquility and into the passionate caress of a man who will stop at nothing for a cause, his cause.

Soon enough, Marie, Frederika and Anne are making headline news as part of a South American terror squad. But when Eduardo's carpet of lies begins to unravel, thread by thread, and his obsession-inducing sexual offensive comes to a slow and subtle halt, his very fate is at stake.

Will the feared Chilean Intelligence Agency finally get him? Will lust intoxicate the minds of three women descending beyond reason? Or will the conned women become the conwomen?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781533307743
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	06/17/2016
Pages:	444
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.99(d)

Read an Excerpt

Covert intelligence agents and security men in the various embassies along the tree-lined street knew instinctively that it was a bomb blast that had intruded on the chilly morning calm. It was hardly an automobile’s backfire. Windows nearby were shattered. Bric-a-brac fell from shelves and tables in the elegant houses innocently included in the blast’s periphery. A pervasive, unfamiliar odor flumed invisibly upward through the usual pall of pollutants hanging in the heavy air of Washington. Someone who not only surmised what had occurred but actually saw the twisted wreckage of the gray Pinto, floating, it seemed, in a cloud of smoky afterblast, called the police. Spectators, hovering behind heavy draperies, contemplated with fascination the block-long wreckage. A hubcap had been blown, like a discus, into the trunk of a tree. A tire lay on the doorstep before the heavy wrought-iron door at the entrance of the Greek Embassy. A trail of upholstery stuffing, white, like heavy snow, lay on the black surface of the road. Experienced eyes, familiar with the impersonal ruthlessness of explosives, picked knowingly among the rubbish of the violence seeking pieces of a human being. A foot, the shoe still carefully laced and reflecting on its shine the glint of the shrouded February sun, lay on a patch of grass, fifty feet from the car’s mangled remains. A ringed hand rested eerily on a piece of deformed chrome ornament. Patches of red materialized adjacent to the main wreckage, adding a grisly highlight to what might have been a surrealistic performance for an avant-garde art show. Officer Bryant of the Executive Protective Force, a tall man with a craggy face, felt thebackwash of bile in his throat as he tamped down an involuntary retch. It was the worst, most horrifying scene he had ever beheld. The first detail he was conscious of was that of a man’s mangled torso in the front seat jammed against the remains of the dashboard. Actually, it was the sight of the head that had made him want to vomit. It was cleanly severed at the neck and lying like an errant basketball on what might have once been the car’s back seat. The eyes were open, the silvery-gray surrounding the black pupils oddly clear and glistening, not at all dull, as one might have expected of dead eyes. A thin mustache, neatly edged, lay perfectly centered above a thickish angel-bowed upper lip. The face was ivory smooth, the fleshtone dark, not tanned by the sun. The mouth was set in a broad sardonic smile, showing even white teeth. “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” Officer Bryant heard himself say after he had assured himself that he had conquered his urge to vomit. He stared at the face in the isolated head, fascinated, compelled to absorb the horror of it. He had no idea what to do. Officially, he was paralyzed.