Showing results by author "Warren Adler" in All Categories

The caller made it clear - $10 million or her daughter's head. The power of unintended consequences sends the privileged life of prominent anti-war activist Sarah Raab crashing down around her. Fear and terror take hold, and Sarah turns to former CIA operative Carl Helman, a man she has only just met and who stands against everything she has been fighting for.

Aging mafia Don Salvatore Padronelli, a.k.a. the Padre, is furious when fanatical terrorists capture his beloved daughter and grandson on a trip to Egypt. Fed up with diplomatic caution that prolongs their captivity, the Padre and his loyal henchman cleverly insinuate themselves into the White House and hold the President and his wife hostage. Now the Padre calls the shots on getting the President to take steps to release his family.

Eighty-three-year-old Harvey Franklin never thought he would find love again after losing his wife of more than 50 years. Spending his days walking his beloved poodle in Central Park, he has gotten used to the idea of being alone. Everything changes the morning he meets 80-year-old Sarah Silverman. Romance blooms between the two, and they quickly become entangled in a passionate love affair. When Sarah reveals her husband's battle with dementia, things become complicated....

In this fast-paced erotic thriller, John Champion, a professional hitman and Angela Ford, the wife of the man who orders the hit, engage in a passionate, overpowering, and memorable love affair. Played out against the exotic locales of Florence, the Riviera, the French Alps, and Manhattan, the two lovers endure impossible odds as their relationship deepens and matures. Figuring importantly in the story is Michelangelo's David, a majestic artistic masterpiece that stands in all its naked glory in the Galleria dell' Academia in Florence and the epiphany experienced by Angela in its presence.

When a string of inexplicable murders rocks the hallowed streets of central D.C., Fiona finds herself charging through the shadows of a mysterious conspiracy. Faced with an investigation with no leads and a rising body count, Fiona's reputation as a top investigator is called into question. At the brink of professional ruin, an encounter with the eccentric yet charismatic Thaddeus Remington III at his museum-like mansion sends Fiona hurtling headlong through a whirlwind of clues.

Thirty-eight-year old divorcee Grace Sorentino is in a precarious position, upwardly mobile in age, downwardly mobile in income. A cosmetician on Palm Beach's fashionable Worth Avenue, she barely makes enough to support her 16-year old daughter Jackie in their tiny apartment. Still they're scraping by, until Grace loses her job. Hanging on by a thread, Grace reluctantly pursues a cynical and bizarre scheme to snare a rich widower.

A firebombing of a black church in Brooklyn that was once a synagogue sets off a chain reaction of international intrigue and bloody violence. The fire bombers are young men of Arab extraction who mistakenly believe that this church is still a synagogue. In the wake of the bombing, a Wall Street firm sends its token Jewish lawyer to help the church in their insurance claim. In a walled-off area in the basement of the church, the pastor has found three huge trunks filled with gold and precious jewels.

Even when murderous gangsters are shoving his head into a toilet, Mickey Fine can’t stop making jokes. He wants a career in comedy so badly that he takes a job as a Tummler, a comedian and host for a hotel in the Catskills, a hotel where he knows the very gangsters who abused him are staying. An already dangerous situation escalates when Mickey falls for Mutzie, the “number one girl” of Pep who is arguably the most violent thug in the hotel. Betrayals and politics within the mob play out behind the scenes while Mutzie joins Mickey on stage.

Mother Nile is the story of Si, the American-born son of an Irish father and Egyptian mother, who goes on a journey through the winding streets of the City of the Dead to solve a half-century-old mystery. When his mother makes an urgent plea on her deathbed, Si knows that he must make the journey to Egypt to find out the truth about his long-lost half-sister, conceived during his mother's affair with King Farouk.

The poison pen of Polly Dearborn, an infamous Washington Post investigative reporter, has gone silent. When Polly is found hanging from her balcony in the Watergate apartments, Washington's elite and powerful rejoice - the Witch of Watergate is dead! But Polly's voice reaches beyond the grave, and her final articles may contain clues to some big secrets. Homicide detective Fiona Fitzgerald, well-versed in the behind-the-scenes dealings of Washington, doesn't buy the suicide angle.

Thirty-five-year-old Jenny and her 62-year-old mother Norma have always seen the world differently. Estranged for years, everything changes when Jenny learns of Norma’s dire state and rushes to New York City to make a startling discovery: her mother is sick and homeless. Living in a women’s shelter slated to be shut down by developer Albert “Doc” Brenner, Norma is leading the charge in stopping him. When Jenny learns that Norma is dying of cancer, she gives her mother something that she’s always wanted. Will it be enough? Can mother and daughter put their differences aside before time runs out?

After serving his Brooklyn district for years, Congressman Sullivan discovers that his once comfortable Irish-American majority has given way to a diverse district of blacks and Hispanics. Challenged by a more liberal opponent, he tries everything possible to maintain his seat only to painfully learn that he and his views are outdated and irrelevant to today's world. But he doesn't bow out of the race gracefully, and the fierce ensuing campaign brings new insights to the meaning of democracy.

When their 23-year-old daughter goes missing, divorcees Harry and Paulie are forced to leave behind their newly constructed lives to track Grace down. But Grace isn't lost, not physically at least. They find her seemingly unharmed in California on a sunny farm the other residents call 'Camp Star'. But nothing is as it seems.... Sinister motives lurk behind the smiles of those at the camp, and the two soon learn that Grace is in the clutches of a notorious cult. Under the spell of mind control, she denies Harry and Paulie as her family and shuns their love.

In an attempt to reconnect with his two alienated adult children, George Temple replicates the memorable horse trek through the forbidding Yellowstone wilderness they had enjoyed 20 years earlier. But his callous children, Courtney and Scott, accompany him only to persuade him to restore the financial support he has withdrawn. As they are led by a drunken guide and a venal horse wrangler over potentially lethal terrain, their bonding experience quickly disintegrates.

Detective Fiona Fitzgerald's privileged upbringing in the nation's capital and her intimate knowledge of its inner workings come in handy when Fran Miller, a top lobbyist and legal expert, turns up dead on Independence Day. It looks like suicide, but when the clues lead back to Mark Chancellor, the husband of Fiona's best friend, things get complicated. Chancellor is at the top of his game, well connected in Washington and known to believe that money is the planet's most powerful weapon.

Detective Fiona Fitzgerald is an unlikely force for justice in Washington, D.C.'s predominantly male police force. As a senator's daughter and top investigator in the homicide division of the Metropolitan Police Department, Fiona maneuvers between two vastly different worlds, moving quickly from opulent galas to gritty crime scenes.

When Charlie and Molly's son dies, their daughter-in-law remarries and is vaulted into an upper class world of money and privilege. She is now determined to lead a new life and keep her son free from the blue-collar influences of her ex in-laws. Forced to sue for their right to visit their beloved grandson, Charlie and Molly enter a world of courtroom conflict that deeply affects everyone involved, including the trial judge. Each of the players in this remarkable drama must search their souls for the right decision.

The people who run the influential newspaper the Washington Chronicle have just exposed and brought down a President through their investigative reports. Flush with power, they are now attempting to create their own choice for Chief Executive. Clashing relationships within the media and in the political arena reveal the motives, insecurities, and thirst for ascendancy between rival factions fighting for power. With rich emotional characterizations, this story tears the curtain from the spin-doctors and sinister figures that populate the corridors of power in the nation's capital.

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.

Cult is a thriller with a chilling climax that shows how the power of sinister forces using mind control techniques can turn innocent people into weapons of destruction. Barney Harrigan, a successful computer entrepreneur, discovers that his young and impressionable wife has been lured by her fanatical sister into the "Glory Cult", a ruthless and powerful group in Oregon run by a charismatic "Guru".