Trapped in a twisted game of love and politics, Claire Deveraux must outwit her captors—or become a pawn in a deadly conspiracy.
Claire Deveraux, the deaf but indomitable foreign service officer stationed at the U.S. Embassy in France, finds herself ensnared in a web of treachery and obsession. Abducted during a conference in Rome, she becomes the object of Franco Lazzari's twisted obsession. A wealthy pharmacist with a dark agenda, Lazzari is looking for his perfect bride.
Isolated in a remote Italian villa, Claire's hearing impairment makes every step risky. Time is running out, and she must marshal every ounce of her ingenuity to escape her captor's clutches. But the true peril runs deeper than she knows.
Unbeknownst to Claire, her kidnapper is not acting alone. A high-ranking official within her own embassy is pulling strings, willing to compromise national security to ensure she's never found. As the walls close in, Claire must unravel a conspiracy that reaches the highest echelons of power.
Will she decode the secrets that bind her before it's too late, or will she become the ultimate casualty in a diabolical game? In a race against time, one woman's resilience becomes the key to untangling a web of deceit and betrayal.
Nebver Say A Word is a newly released novel (September 29. 2023) It has one 5-star rating on Amazon and one 5-star rating on Goodreads. It is the sequel to Every Silent Thing.
A man using the name Franco Lazzari folded and refolded his copy of Il Tempo four times after reading the feature story about the deaf American woman. Claire Deveraux. She was the one he wanted. The one he had to have. It took him only two hours of deliberative thought and two phone calls to devise a plan. During that time, he reread the article three more times.
“The picture doesn’t do you justice,” he said, running his fingers over the photograph beneath the headline. “You are a bella signorina. You are far prettier in person.”
He kissed her picture four times then, while gazing adoringly at it, said, “Mia tesora, my darling, I count myself the luckiest man in all of Italy, for soon I will have you and will never let you go. Not ever.”
She hadn’t been his first choice only because he hadn’t been aware she was even on the list. He could have found a local Italian girl or even a prostitute but he didn’t want one of them. He wanted a foreign woman. With the conference having any number of foreigners, he scouted out the list of presenters given to him a week before, thanks to a lucrative payment he made to an associate in the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs who was hosting the convention. Lazzari had known him since their days as university roommates.
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Briant Guzmán
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