Finished Fr 8/28/20
This is one of my ancient paperbacks and there is no notation on the flyleaf if I had ever read it.
Robert Daley is the gold standard for 'the cop procedural' and this is one of my favorite genres.
Robert Daley served as Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Police Department in 1971-72. He was born in 1930 and he is still alive. The author's page at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Daley
The novel is mostly set in Columbia and South America. Ray Douglas was the head of a New York police narcotics division and he was kind of banished to South America due to an internecine 'turf battle' after a huge heroin bust. The novel is set in the 80's and was at the beginning of The War On Drugs and federal, state, and city agencies were fighting as to who would handle the planning and logistics of the operations.
Douglas is sent to Columbia and it's left to him as to what to due. He is like a fish out of water and the drug kingpins of South America have completely bought the local governments and police forces and pretty much run the show. These men are ruthless criminals, but run their operations like they were CEO's of major international companies.
Jane Fox is another 'fish out of water'. She is an investigative journalist and fights to be stationed to cover the South American drug operations. In the 80's women were fighting for their place in the workplace and she knows that if she had been a man, nothing would stand in her way, but since she's a woman she is scrutinized far more closely. And, she is in a stale marriage and has outgrown her husband's outdated values and views on women. And, Jane and Ray are almost destined to fall in love. Ray is a recent widower and he falls the hardest. He has grown children and he really loved his dead wife, but now it's time to begin again.
Because Jane is pretty she is able to form relationships with at least one of the drug kingpins. And, late in the novel she is kidnapped by one of the drug lords. Ray moves heaven and earth to orchestrate the various agencies to work to get her back. He is successful and although she had second thoughts and was thinking of reunited with her husband, but on the last page you learn that she is going through with her divorce and she will be with Ray Douglas.
A quote from the author at the book's page at Amazon Books:
"... Much later I served as an NYPD Deputy Commissioner, ducking under the yellow tape to get as close to the crime scenes as possible, and on that experience I based a number of the novels that were to come. I wrote also about bullfighting, opera, grand prix racing, France, wine, treasure diving, for I plunged into all those worlds as well, plunged all the way to the end if possible, where I stood around gawking for a time, then wrote as accurately as I could, whether in fiction or non-fiction about what I had found. There is a price exacted of those who ignore traffic signs. I paid it in fear, defeat, humiliation, even in lawsuits. But other times I reaped an incredible profusion of excitement and delight—and also made a good living. To keep my enthusiasm high, I had to keep discovering new worlds, new people, for otherwise writing is hard, hard, hard, sometimes impossible. There were so many strange doors out there, all of them strangely ajar, at least to a writer. One had only to lean a little and they would open and whatever was behind them would be revealed. It’s all in this book. This is my story."
I liked the book and I found another novel on the shelves by Daley which I plan to read.