12 Drummers Drumming [Kindle Edition]

Diana Deverell (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Diana Deverell was a U.S. Foreign Service officer in such places 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. Kathryn "Casey" Collins finds her work becoming personal and very dangerous when her renegade Polish intelligence agent-lover Stefan Krajewski appears to have been one of the 200-plus victims in the bombing of an airliner on the 10th anniversary of the Lockerbie massacre. When Casey tries to do some freelance digging, she somehow becomes one of the bad guys--targeted by the FBI for possible involvement in the bombing. Also hot on her trail are the terrorists themselves, looking for revenge for the role she and Stefan played in nabbing the original Lockerbie villains. Add to the mix an inscrutable Danish Lutheran priest and Army officer (known as Father-Major) now running a covert intelligence operation and you have a milieu worthy of the best of Len Deighton, if not John Le Carré. 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. --Dick Adler

From Publishers Weekly

An overambitious attempt to meld a post-Cold War spy thriller and a star-crossed romance, Deverell's debut introduces us to Kathryn "Casey" Collins, a foreign service officer who enjoys a blissful?if hardly predictable or safe?relationship with Stefan Krajewski, a former infiltrator of the Polish secret police who's long worked undercover for Danish intelligence. When, on the anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, a flight Stefan may have taken explodes over the Atlantic, Casey doesn't know if her lover is dead or in hiding and goes to Denmark to investigate. Her snooping attracts the notice of the FBI and makes Casey herself a suspect in the bombing. Casey is forced to flee the country; when Stefan shows up alive, with an attractive female partner by his side, Casey must question how well she really knows her lover?even as she attempts to prove her innocence to the FBI by reeling in Kruger, a villainous, high-level former East German intelligence official. Deverell sets a number of promising story lines in motion: Stefan's shady background and mysterious parentage; Casey's status as a fugitive unsure who she can trust; and the suspense surrounding Kruger's nefarious schemes. It is disappointing that she doesn't linger long enough on any of these plot strands to generate compelling interest in them or in her characters. Agent, Nancy Yost.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 482 KB
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (March 15, 2001)
• Sold by: Hachette Book Group
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0017QW64Y
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,587 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

A former United States Foreign Service officer, DIANA DEVERELL served in San Salvador, Warsaw, and Washington D.C. She and her husband, a former Captain of the Royal Danish Army, live in Denmark and have traveled extensively in Europe. Ms. Deverell made her literary debut with 12 Drummers Drumming, which was followed by Night on Fire. East Past Warsaw is her third book featuring State Department counterterrorist Casey Collins. You can find her on Facebook or visit her official website at http://www.dianadeverell.com/

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unimaginative and Uninteresting, March 25, 2000

By 

richard_t "richard_t" (Overseas) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: 12 Drummers Drumming (Mass Market Paperback)

Deverell takes great pains to tell us that she was a diplomat. In the cover blurbs and the author's note and the bio page, her greatest credential is the five years she spent as a junior officer in the U.S. foreign service,. What she doesn't reveal is that as a junior officer, she spent two years in San Salvador stamping visas into passports, dozens each day, the bureaucratic equivalent of flipping burgers. As a junior personnel officer in Poland, she spent two years reading regulations about sick leave and salary grade levels. She brings all of this talent and experience to bear in Twelve Drummers Drumming. Her purported detailed understanding of the inner workings of the State Department in Washington (where she never worked) consist of two facts: that S/CT is the name of the counter-terrorism office and INR is the name of the intelligence bureau. These are tidbits anyone can get out of the phone book. Beyond that she really has no insights at all about what goes on behind the scenes in Washington or in overseas embassies.

However, her puffing up her resume is nothing new in publishing or any other field. It would all be quite excusable if only the book was a good one. Unfortunately, it's not. Casey Collins, the herone, shares many of the author's resume bullet points: El Salvador, Poland, Denmark. We can only hope that the Collins character didn't also inherit her creator's personality. For Collins is a whiny self-absorbed bore. She thinks in puerile simplicities, she is breathlessly in love or dangerously heartbroken. Childishly shocked by this or that perceived insult, convinced by the heavenly purity of her love, mewling about how difficult are her life and her mission, getting into ridiculous situations like a blind kitten and then pouting that she has no way out of her predicament. The premise of the book is promising, but the writing is unimaginative, the characters uninteresting, and the plot unconvincing. There are lots of writers out there in the suspense/espionage genre, better to give Deverell a pass.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Effective spy thriller with more humanity than most., November 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING H (Hardcover)

12 Drummers is engaging, exciting stuff, recalling the thrills and chills of LeCarre and Deighton. But here, the dusty old men's club is aired out, and human connections have real substance. (So does the food!) A great read for a winter evening.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 12 Drummers Drumming, February 28, 2000

By 

Joy V. Formy-Duval "Joy" (Boiling Spring Lakes, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 12 Drummers Drumming (Mass Market Paperback)

For over a decade Casey Collins has sought out, confronted and apprehended terrorists. And when a New York-bound flight from England explodes shortly after takeoff, killing all on board, she fears Stefan Krajewski, a Polish operative for the Danish Defense Intelligence and her lover, went down with the plane. Casey immediately flies to England to investigate.

Casey's motives are pure, but her actions quickly become suspect and she's forced underground to prevent capture by her own people. Working with people she neither knows nor trusts, she learns Stefan withheld information that would have influenced her objectivity over the years; secrets that now threaten to destroy her and those she loves. Betrayal...that fine line between love and hate. The cost of betrayal...the number of lives of innocent people lost to kill one operative.

Not once, not twice, but three times she offers herself as bait to catch Reinhardt Kruger, the monster orchestrating the bombings. Not once, but twice she rendezvous with him and twice he has reduced the size of her little band of mercenaries in his wake to escape.

Faced with death on foreign soil by the enemy or imprisonment back in the states by her employer, the US Government, Casey does what she does best. She meets her adversary head on and spits on those responsible for the violence surround her.

Each page is filled with fast-paced suspense and you'll find yourself wondering what's going to happen next. As a former Foreign Service Officer in San Salvador and Poland, Deverell draws on her experience to give authenticity to the settings and nations of people who value human life so little, thereby giving her audience an excellent read.