Part of Series
Everything starts somewhere ... For Kathryn ”Casey” Collins, that somewhere was the chillier side of the Iron Curtain one January night in 1986. On a deserted highway in rural Poland, her VW slams into a wild boar. He's road kill, she's stuck in a ditch, and the temperature's headed down, down, down. To keep them both from freezing to death, the 27-year-old career diplomat cajoles Matt, her Marine guard passenger, into a double sleeping bag and climbs in after him. A night of whispered secrets and unplanned warmth propels Casey into an accidental relationship with fateful consequences. When she messes with a horny Marine five years her junior, she raises eyebrows in the Warsaw embassy. When young Matt dumps her to fall into a honeytrap set by the Polish clone of the KGB, he risks a prison sentence for treason. Foreign agent Stefan Krajewski is suddenly on her doorstep, offering to rescue the lad. What does he want from Casey in return? Expanded and retitled since first published in 1996, "Warm Bodies in a Cold War" brings Casey to the threshold of a sinister labyrinth of seduction, betrayal and terror. Included with the short story is the first chapter of "No Place for an Honest Woman", in which Casey is drawn unwillingly into the field to begin the counterterrorist crusade continued in "12 Drummers Drumming", "Night on Fire" and "East Past Warsaw".
Author
A native Oregonian, Diana Deverell was a US Foreign Service Officer and served in Washington DC, San Salvador, and Warsaw, before she moved to rural Denmark to write fulltime. Her latest release is LAY BARE THE LIE, the sixth book in the Nora Dockson legal thriller series, featuring a woman ex-con turned appeals lawyer. The first five books in order are HELP Me NORA, RIGHT THE WRONG, HEAR MY PLEA, JUDGE ME NOT, and OPEN THE DOOR. “Mercy Find Me”, a story spun off the series, was a finalist for the 2019 Derringer Award for short mystery fiction. and is now available as an ebook short story. Diana debuted as a published writer in 1998 with 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING, her first Casey Collins International Thriller. 12 Drummers Drumming, her first international thriller. The latest thriller in the series is CHINA BOX. The four-book series spans seventeen years in the career of her heroine, State Department intelligence analyst Casey Collins. Diana has also written the political thriller BITCH OUT OF HELL starring security pro Bella Hinton and told in Bella’s own salty words. Bella is the heroine of “Payback is a Bitch,” a short story appearing in the Fiction River – Pulse Pounders: Countdown, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Before shining in stories of her own, Bella played a supporting role in several international thrillers taking place from the Cold War to the present. Diana’s published short fiction includes five stories starring FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd which are available as ebook short stories. Dawna’s early adventures are collected in RUN & GUN: A Dozen Tales of Girls with Guns and she plays a supporting role in BITCH OUT OF HELL and three international thrillers.
