Wilderness of Mirrors - Hardcover

Two old women friends collide in this cloak-and-dagger set in London, Hong Kong, and Hanoi. Cassie Stewart is an investor; her friend Eva Cunningham poses as one. After years in the Far East, Eva has returned to Britain, peddling a tale about a diamond mine in Vietnam. Unbeknownst to ambitiously greedy Cassie, Eva could care less about the ice: she's a British agent assigned by her controller to lure a third investor, Robie Frazer, into the mining venture. Controller Stormont wants to force Frazer, a murky moneyman with connections to Chinese criminals, to spy on Chinese nuclear proliferation, but Eva's private agenda is to kill Frazer for having once turned her into a junkie. And so Davies, in her second financial espionage tale (the first was Nest of Vipers ), must balance the three strands of intrigue--Cassie's greed, Eva's vengeance, Stormont's realpolitik--butd rather quickly forgets all except Eva. The other two hang around to the end, trailing in Eva's wake as she seduces Frazer in pursuit of her vendetta. A bit simple for devotees of international intrigue (the nuclear angle could have been better developed), but Davies makes Eva into a beautiful siren of spying, recommendation enough. Gilbert Taylor

Davies's stock couldn't be higher since she debuted last spring with the best-selling financial thriller Nest of Vipers (LJ 1/95). Now it's time to see whether she can really deliver. Here, Eva Cunningham works undercover for British Intelligence to snare an international businessman suspected of dealing illicitly in nuclear weapons from China.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.