Blue Fire / Black Amber Author:Phyllis A. Whitney Paired in this volume are two of Phyllis A. Whitney's most suspenseful romances, one set in myth-enshrouded Africa, the other against modern mosques and minarets of modern Turkey. — When Susan Hohenfield, heroine of BLUE FIRE, journeys from Chicago to Africa, her childhood home, she is both happy and apprehensive. Recently married to Dirk Hohenfi... more »eld, a man she adores but scarcely knows, she fears her first encounter with her dimly remembered father who exists in her mind as the ogre who drove her and her mother from his home -- and later served a prison term for smuggling diamonds.
During the first weeks in Cape Town it is not her father who disturbs Susan. Other people, however, threaten to destroy both her marriage and her life. One is John Cornish, a writer who helped send her father to prison; another, the seductive Mara Bellman, who tells Susan, "I'm in love with Dirk and I mean to have him." When Dirk himself hints that as a child Susan might have been implicated in a long-forgotten crime, she is even more confounded.
In BLACK AMBER, New York career girl Tracy Hubbard vows to solve the mystery of her sister's "suicide by drowning" in the Bosporus. But now that she is in Istanbul, an impostor in the exotic household of Sylvana Erim, Tracy is baffled by a series of eerie events.
In the ruins of a palace she overhears a heated argument in Turkish -- the only name she can understand is her own name. She watches an unlighted boat pay a nocturnal visit to the villa's dock. An alarming passage in a book is marked with a string of black amber beads.
Tracy has come to the Erim home to work as assistant to Miles Radburn, the famous artist. Is Radburn grieving over the death of his young wife -- Tracy's sister -- or is he part of some loathsome secret hidden in the past? Tracy struggles desperately to resist this violent man who can be so strangely tender -- especially when she senses that she already knows too much and that her life is in peril!« less