Сидни Шелдон: The sky is falling

Dana Evans, who made her first appearance in Sidney Sheldon s The Best Laid Plans, is a spunky, good-looking, young Washington TV journalist who s recently returned to the nation s capital from the Balkans, where she adopted a handicapped war orphan who s having trouble adjusting to life in America. But that doesn t keep Dana from following a story all over the world, from Washington to Aspen, Nice, Juneau, Dьsseldorf, Rome, Brussels, Moscow, and Siberia. Each of these brief visits is like a postcard—a local landmark or two, an interesting local restaurant (at least in the European venues), and another piece of the puzzle, which has to do with why every member of a venerable, old Washington dynasty has died a violent death in the last year. It seems strange that in a media-savvy city like Washington, no one but Dana has noticed there s a pattern in the rapid extinction of the Winthrops or even whispered the words family vendetta. But that s why pretty, young girl TV reporters were invented, at least by Sheldon.

As Dana sets out to investigate the distinguished career of the Winthrop family patriarch, her lover Jeff, a sports anchor at her station, is called away to administer aid and succor to his former wife, a beautiful model who s realized, too little and too late, that she never should have dumped him. And Kemal, the 12-year-old orphan, is being drugged by his baby sitter, who s in cahoots with at least one set of bad guys. Dana hasn t noticed how tractable the temperamental boy has become recently because she s been dressing up like a two-bit Russian tramp to infiltrate a secret weapons base in Siberia… Do you hear the words movie locations? But all s well that ends well, as it usually does for Sheldon s heroines, and in the meantime you ve learned where the five-star hotels are and what to order in a famous restaurant in Rome. A slick, commercial, slightly thin tale told by a craftsman of the genre.