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MEET ME IN VENICE by Elizabeth Adler Antiques dealer Precious Rafferty lives in romantic Paris, but without a romance of her own. That is, until dashing Bennett James appears out of nowhere to sweep Preshy off her feet. Things heat up when the discovery of a legendary necklace half a world away starts a cat-and-mouse game of danger and intrigue. Suddenly Preshy wonders if she can trust her heart when her life is at stake. |
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Excerpt from Select Editions' MEET ME IN VENICE
Mary-Lou already knew all about that safe. She'd found out about it several months ago. Lurking in the cellar, she'd held her cell-phone camera as Lily dialed the numbers. Later, when Lily was out, she'd walked back down, and dialed the combination. The safe opened and its contents were hers. Up until now it had contained only money. She'd realized she had found Lily's stolen stash, her profits from plundered antiquities. Mary-Lou was almost certain Lily never counted the neat bundles. Why should she, when she believed no one else knew about the hidden safe and its combination? Mary-Lou had helped herself plentifully over the months. This morning, however, as Lily opened the case she removed from the safe, Mary-Lou was scarcely able to hold back a gasp when she saw what it contained. She had never seen jewels like that: the massive emeralds, diamonds and rubies, and the pearl the size of a robin's egg. Where, she wondered, astonished, had Lily gotten her hands on it? She stole silently back upstairs, her pulses throbbing with excitement, adrenaline flowing. The necklace must be worth a fortune. All you needed was the right buyer… |
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BRITISH-BORN Elizabeth Adler and
her American husband Richard
have lived in Brazil and England
and Canada and Ireland, but a few
years ago they fell in love with
La Quinta, California, a town
that calls itself "The Gem of the
Desert" and that Adler refers to as
"paradise." They share their home
with their two cats, Sweet Pea and
Sunny.One reason for Adler's love of her desert home is that "it is so peaceful for writing," she says. But there has to be more to her success as a writer than a peaceful setting, and one has to ask Adler how she does it. Her answer? "I don't know. It's certainly not any magic formula. It's simply something there, inside my head. Maybe it's due to that childhood shyness that cut me off from people and forced me into a world of my own imagination. I was an observer rather than a participant, an eavesdropper on conversations, a gleaner of information. A writer must be all these things." Adler claims that the inspiration behind her books is the main character. "As I write her, I get to know her, to understand how she thinks, reacts, who she is. Once I have the idea for that character, that person, then the other characters emerge and the story begins to form around her." A character like Meet Me in Venice's Precious Rafferty can practically take Adler over. "When I'm writing these women, I almost become them: I think for them, feel for them . . . It's very personal." Despite her success, writing is a love/hate occupation for Adler. "I love it when I start a new book," she says, "I can't sleep for the long months I'm writing it, and I love it when it's finished and out of my head, at last." She also finds writing to be a never-ending business. "I write all the time: on my Mac, on the little notepads I keep in my purse and scattered around the house, in the middle of the night when an idea comes to me. It's such a pain, because I have to get out of bed and write everything down immediately. If I don't, I know I'll have forgotten it by morning. The fact is, there is no rest for a writer." Adler does have one way of coping with her obsession with writing. "One personal quirk is that I must always have music in the background when I'm writing. And each piece of music in some way relates to the story." When writing about Venice, Vivaldi and "The Four Seasons" was a natural choice. For a story set in Ireland, there was her favorite Van Morrison album, "Avalon Sunset," and the group known as the Pogues. And writing about Paris? For that she needs jazz. Combine the great pianist Bill Evans with some "soft, smooth, sexy" Dexter Gordon, and you begin to get a feel for the all-encompassing nature of the way this author works. What else does Adler say contributes to her successful writing career? "My biggest passion in life-after my family and my cats and writing-is travel." And this travel does not go to waste, as she works it all into her stories (including, for instance, her exploration of Shanghai in preparation for writing Meet Me in Venice). "In my novels, location always plays an important part," she says. "Almost any place my characters go is real-the cafes and restaurants, the streets, the local shops. I've walked down those streets, breathed the air, felt how it was to be there." In the end, Adler describes herself as a writer of romantic thrillers with a sense of place and ambience. The thrills come from her imagination; the sense of place comes from her personal travel. And the romance? Well, she points out that she has been married for over thirty years. "So tell me," she says, "do you think I'm qualified to write about romance?" 
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