No Place for an Honest Woman

Praise for Diana Deverell’s thrillers

Praise for Diana Deverell’s thrillers b***h OUT OF HELL, the new political thriller featuring security pro Bella Hinton“Helluva read! I really enjoyed this. I hope there are more books coming. The characters are intriguing, Bella is intelligent and sassy, and the plot is entertaining.” (sss reader review)

“Diana Deverell’s newest book could be a story on the six o’clock news - the outsourcing of America’s military functions, shady corporate dealings, the suspicious death of a whistleblowing board member, and a special prosecutor’s investigation.” (iBooks reader review)

“. . . a delightfully humorous and suspenseful read with realistic characters . . . and the plot twists and weaves itself into a satisfying conclusion. For a fun thriller read, check this out.” (Kings River Life review)

12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING“Chilling suspense and heated passions—a brilliant debut.”

Barbara Parker, Edgar-Finalist author of Suspicion of Innocence

“Diana Deverell was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in such place as San Salvador and Poland. So when she has the central character of her tough and moving debut thriller give us inside details of a State Department agency dedicated to fighting terrorists, they have the smack and tang of reality. . . . a milieu worthy of the best of Len Deighton, if not John LeCarre. With those and other masters of the espionage genre making increasingly rare appearances these days, it’s good to have someone as skilled as Deverell arriving so stylishly on the scene.”

Amazon.com—d**k Adler

“Non-stop suspense and an intriguing plot that will keep you guessing until the end. 12 Drummers Drumming is a splendid first novel . . . Highly recommended.”

Booked for Murder, Ltd. mystery book store—Mary Helen Becker

“Here’s a title to add to your short list of espionage stories with female protagonists. (Yes, there’s le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl, but not much more.) . . . Deverell covers a lot of spy-rich territory here, involving not only the U.S. State Department, but also the Mossad and intelligence agencies in Poland and former East Germany. It’s a good thing she had the foresight to provide a key; readers may need it to keep the players straight as the action speeds along.”

Booklist

“Diana Deverell applies her first-hand knowledge and her literary skills to a thriller called 12 Drummers Drumming which will keep you on your toes. She writes with a polish and a flair that holds nothing back in the areas of terror, torture and adventure as well as in more tender worlds of love and loyalties. . . Deverell has concocted an incredible plot and carries it off well.”

National Public Radio

“12 Drummers Drumming is a dynamite action thriller. It kept me up well past my bedtime. I could not put it down. Had to find out how Casey Collins, its FSO heroine, thwarts a Libyan terrorist plot. Since I served in San Salvador with Diana quite a while ago, I could be biased in my favorable appraisal of her book, but I don’t think so. She writes in the first person, purporting still to be a FSO, working in S/CT, fighting terrorism. Drawing lightly on her State Department background and heavily on a vivid imagination, her tale of adventure is gripping . . . all of this is lightly spiced with s*x and heavily seasoned with violent deaths, mostly, but not entirely, of bad guys. All in all, the Foreign Service’s loss of Diana Deverell is a great gain for readers of international thrillers. Best of all, she is working on a new novel.”

Deane R. Hinton, Career Ambassador (ret.)

“Fast-paced. . . A good summer vacation read.”

Library Journal

“Don’t look to 12 Drummers Drumming if you are seeking something in the James Bond tradition. Instead, with a protagonist who makes her share of mistakes, we have someone here who is far more real and who more closely resembles LeCarré’s anti-heroes.”

I Love a Mystery

NIGHT ON FIRE“The pace is fast, the characterizations are strong, and Deverell has even more finely honed her ability to make language pull us into the action: ‘I touched her shoulder, my eyes on the slicked down strands of her hair. The overhead fixture highlighted the gray strands, marbling the red. I smelled the strawberry gel she put on it, overlaid by the odor of meadow grasses from Dyrehave, beneath both the rank scent of her terror.’

“Once a Foreign Service officer herself, Deverell knows the terrain she writes about very well, whether it be the physical Europe, the political Europe, or the dynamic and uneasy blend of cultures that a millennia of togetherness/separation has wrought. Night on Fire places you in the middle of a very real landscape.

“In fact, everything about this book seems very real: the people, the places, the action. All that makes for a thriller that grips rather than merely interests, a thriller that grabs you by the throat and makes you come along for the ride. And with Deverell in the driver’s seat, the ride is unforgettable.”

The Statesman Journal (Oregon)

“Diana Deverell has once again taken us to the slippery and dangerous place where criminals, terrorists, cops, spies and diplomats collude and connive and deceive. The characters guiding us are like the ones she knows from her own experience—good, but flawed people confused and frustrated by moral, legal and bureaucratic conundrums.”

Donald R. Hamilton, former Deputy Director of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Office

“Black market missiles and warring bikers mix dangerously with a teenage boy’s medical emergency and a troubling, out-of-the-past romance in Deverell’s solid second Casey Collins novel (after 12 Drummers Drumming). The engaging narrative is an adroit blend of soap opera and action-adventure, with the human relationships sharing center stage with the gripping mystery and the wily plot twists. Thanks to sharp storytelling, the intertwining subplots feed seamlessly into the main plot line, and Deverell’s fine-tuned first-person narration showcases Casey’s intelligence and emotional heft to equally involving effect.”

Publishers Weekly

“Night on Fire is an excellent international espionage thriller that brings to life the anti-terrorism efforts of American and Europe. The story line is non-stop with treason and double cross as the name of the game. However, what makes Diana Deverell’s novel worth reading is the author allows her characters to fully develop so that readers feel concern for them. Anyone who enjoys an entertaining espionage thriller will want to read Ms. Deverell’s superb novel.”

I Love a Mystery

“Deverell successfully juggles at least three distinct plot lines throughout the book. A number of off-the-beaten track foreign locations, showdowns and passionate interludes are deftly detailed before Deverell pulls everything neatly together at the end.”

The Philadelphia City Paper

“Armchair detectives and accidental tourists are in store for a summer treat with Diana Deverell’s second spy thriller. ...For readers fond of things Scandinavian, Night on Fire is set almost entirely in Denmark in mid-summer, with a dank interlude in Devon to chill the overheated reader. ...Bodice-ripping lust and surprising connections between sub-plots propel this thriller.”

Tri-County News (Oregon)

“Deverell’s skill at spinning a complex and twisted plot remains undiminished from 12 Drummers Drumming, the first in this series. ...The Danish setting is another plus. While the book never bogs down with long descriptions, Deverell’s knowledge and obvious affection for the country and its people add another layer of depth to an already solid work.”

Crescent Blues

EAST PAST WARSAW“In the third novel-length outing of Casey Collins and her so-improbable-they-have-to-be-real cohorts Diana Deverell has once again crafted a tale that makes you pray it’s fiction.

“Unlike James Bond who dashed from international crisis to international crisis with nary a thought to hearth and home, Casey Collins, like all women, juggles concerns about people in her life with the demands of her job. A beloved father in terrifying thrall to Alzheimer’s disease, a godson just recovering from radiation-induced leukemia, a dear friend in late pregnancy, and a lover who has grown distant compete for Casey’s attention with stolen plutonium probably bound for the insanity that passes for logic in North Korea. Casey knows all too well that the fall of the Soviet Union left thousands of nuclear warheads, and other fissionable materials, under the control of unscrupulous and desperate people who are only too happy to sell to the highest bidder.

“Women take center stage in East Past Warsaw, on both sides of the good/bad equation. The scope and importance of the action and issues involved in all of Deverell’s books (this is a good time to read 12 Drummers Drumming and Night on Fire if you haven’t already done so) at first blush seem to say ‘torn from the headlines.’ In reality, they are the details behind the two paragraph story buried on page 27 of your local paper whose lead reads something like ‘stolen plutonium, believed bound for North Korea, has been recovered by agents of (a very anonymous sounding international agency).’”

S.E. Warwick, Mystery Reviewer

CHINA BOXA Macavity Award finalist acclaimed for her “sharp story telling” (Publishers Weekly), Diana Deverell brings her all-too-human heroine Casey Collins back to the US and into action as “an intricate chess match of espionage, international wheeling-dealing, and love plays out in Washington and Silicon Valley.” (reader review)

The Nora Dockson legal thriller series“A great character, a great series—I highly recommend it to people.” (Stephen Campbell, CrimeFiction.FM)

Help Me Nora is “a compelling gritty novel. I could not put it down and found the legal background fascinating.” (Goodreads review)

“The series is great; it's got the theme of the hard scrabble up-from-poverty Nora doing her battle of wits against a scheming, social-climbing assistant attorney general, laced with tons of good detective work.” (sss reader review)

“Deverell has a gift that grabs the reader so one cares about what happens to every character in the story. Once one starts Nora's clear sighted and brilliant pursuit of justice it's hard to put the book down!” (sss reader review)

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