The Claire Deveraux series

Shy and deaf, 23-year-old Claire Deveraux has worked hard to land her dream job as a foreign service officer at the US Embassy in Paris. Yet her idyllic life is shattered when she finds a woman lying on the restroom floor dying from a gunshot wound. The dying woman utters three words to Claire and conceals a thumb drive in Claire’s pocket. The items are keys to the location of proceeds from a bank robbery. The killer, certain Claire now has sole possession of those items, must find her, recover the code words and the drive, then kill her before she can solve the puzzle and recover the money.

A political storm erupts when Claire Deveraux, a deaf employee of the U.S. Embassy in France, is abducted at a conference in Rome. The kidnapper, Franco Lazzari, is a wealthy pharmacist who has been scouring Italy for the perfect wife. Unable to hear, and with time against her, Claire must use all of her wits to escape Lazzari’s remote home in the Italian countryside.