Warm Bodies in a Cold War: A Short Story featuring Casey Collins: Casey Collins International Thrillers

By Diana Deverell

Everything starts somewhere . . . .

For 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 unexpected warmth propels Casey into an accidental relationship with fateful consequences.

A Macavity Award nominee acclaimed for her "sharp storytelling" (Publishers Weekly) in the Casey Collins International Thriller series, Diana Deverell brings you the short story where it all began.

Buy "Warm Bodies in a Cold War" today and meet Casey at the threshold of a sinister labyrinth of seduction, espionage, and terror that continues in the prequel No Place for an Honest Woman and the multivolume series beginning with 12 Drummers Drumming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sorrel Press
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507013076

Diana Deverell

Diana Deverell has published seven novels, a short fiction collection, and many short stories. Her latest project is a series of legal thrillers set in Spokane and featuring Nora Dockson, a lawyer who specializes in appeal of life imprisonment and death penalty sentences. The first, Help Me Nora, was released in July, 2014. The second, Right the Wrong, was released in March, 2015. The third book will be published in late 2015. For the latest update, visit Diana at www.dianadeverell.com Diana made her debut as a novelist in 1998 with a series of international thrillers featuring State Department counterterrorist analyst Kathryn “Casey” Collins: 12 Drummers Drumming, Night on Fire, and East Past Warsaw. The three novels are also available in a single ebook, The Casey Collins Trilogy. Diana’s short story, "Warm Bodies in a Cold War", originally published in 1996 under a different title, introduced Casey to the readership of the Foreign Service Journal. The prequel No Place for an Honest Woman expanded on Casey’s early career. The story and all four thrillers are now available as individual ebooks. In 2000, Diana’s short fiction starring FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd started making regular appearances in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Her mystery collection, Run & Gun: A Dozen Tales of Girls with Guns includes eleven Dawna Shepherd stories first published by Alfred Hitchcock, plus all-new “Latin Groove”. Both the collection and “In Plain Sight,” her 2013 mystery, are available in e-editions. Dawna’s latest adventure, “Blown,” appeared in the Kobo Special Edition of Pulse Pounders, the Januaury 2015 issue of Fiction River anthology. In 2012, Diana released her comic mystery novel, Murder, Ken Kesey, and Me as an ebook. Other digital editions include "Heart Failure", a short story set on the day Jim Morrison died, written to order for a publisher of textbooks for Danish teens learning English. Diana is a member (and past board member) of the International Association of Crime Writers. She belongs to the American Women’s Club in Denmark and her short fiction has appeared in Good Works: Prose and Poetry by Ex-Pat Women in Denmark.

Book preview

WARM BODIES IN A COLD WAR

A Short Story Introducing Casey Collins

by Diana Deverell

Published by Sorrel Press

www.sorrelpress.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Praise for Diana Deverell’s international thrillers

WARM BODIES IN A COLD WAR - 1

WARM BODIES IN A COLD WAR - 2

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

OTHER EBOOKS BY DIANA DEVERELL

THE FIRST CHAPTER FROM NO PLACE FOR AN HONEST WOMAN

THE FIRST CHAPTER FROM 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING

THE FIRST CHAPTER FROM NIGHT ON FIRE

THE FIRST CHAPTER FROM EAST PAST WARSAW

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

Praise for Diana Deverell’s thrillers

The Casey Collins international thriller series

12 Drummers Drumming

Chilling suspense and heated passions—a brilliant debut. (Barbara Parker, Edgar-Finalist author of Suspicion of Innocence)

Night on Fire

Deverell's solid second Casey Collins novel [has] engaging narrative, gripping mystery, and wily plot twists. (Publishers Weekly)

East Past Warsaw

. . . a tale that makes you pray it’s fiction. (S.E. Warwick, mystery reviewer)

China Box

an intricate chess match of espionage, international wheeling-dealing, and love plays out in Washington and Silicon Valley. (Amazon reader review)

The Nora Dockson legal thriller series

Lay Bare the Lie, the sixth and newest Nora Dockson legal thriller, "tops all the others in so many ways. There’s a gripping I-didn’t-see-that-coming plot, the relationships among the continuing characters are evolving, and the descriptions of Oregon and Washington are wonderful. It’s up to Nora, aided by her state trooper boyfriend Kent Harper, to lay bare the lies and save Patty Jean, her mother, and Hunter, her half-sister.

"It wouldn’t be a Nora Dockson novel without a legal case, and this time Channing Palmer, Nora’s colleague at the Legal Resource Center, takes center stage. She’s working on a ‘Bogus Expert Witness Project’, trying to free a client convicted of murder solely by the testimony of a dubious ‘expert witness’ on blood stains and spatters. Determined to prove the expert witness wrong, Channing enrolls in a class on how to interpret blood at a crime scene. Fans of CSI will revel in the detail of Channing’s course. Like Nora, she will also ‘lay bare the lie’ of the expert witness.

The author is a master at putting you inside a scene so vividly you’d swear you had actually lived through it. I’ve never been to Pendleton, but I feel I could walk down a street there and recognize everything. Nora, Hunter, and Patty-Jean are true-to-life characters that we’d like to spend more time with. (Amazon reader review)

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. (Amazon 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! (Amazon reader review)

Bitch Out of Hell, the new political thriller featuring 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. (Amazon 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)

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