Nikki Navarre's Blog - Posts Tagged "thriller"

I remember so clearly the first time I saw Captain First Rank Victor Kostenko. I was at a posh hotel in Atlanta, attending an awards ceremony at the Moonlight & Magnolias conference sponsored by the Georgia Romance Writers. I didn’t win, so I treated myself to one of my signature cocktails—a vodka martini, straight up and very dirty—then went to bed despondent. I must have had very vivid dreams, because when I woke up, this renegade Russian submarine captain was standing over my bed. Think golden hair like melted butter, too long for regulation…glacial blue eyes…a hard jaw glittering with gold-dust stubble…and broad shoulders encased in the black jacket and epaulets of a Russian submarine captain.

So began my obsession with maverick captain Victor Kostenko, the golden boy of the Russian navy—until he lost his command for an act of treason he didn’t commit. Now it’s rumored he’ll do anything to get back in his government’s good graces. Until that happens, this competitive, aggressive, ex-Olympic athlete is trapped in a desk job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as punishment for someone else’s crime. He’s a bomb waiting to go off, which makes him very exciting and very dangerous. Victor is also the hero in my debut book for River Valley Publishing.

Set in the edgy cosmopolitan world of contemporary Moscow, The Russian Seduction is smart, sensual romantic suspense with lots of glamour and international intrigue. State secrets have never been this sexy! The book offers an inside peek at the hidden world of diplomacy. How do I know? I know because for five years I worked in a diplomatic assignment in Russia, in a setting similar to my heroine, rising-star American diplomat Alexis Castle. She’s clawed her way up the male-dominated diplomatic ladder by working twice as hard as her male colleagues and being twice as good. Yet it’s whispered her impressive achievements are due solely to her male connections: the legendary diplomat who was her father, and the ruthless, amoral ex-husband who just became her boss. Alexis is itching to prove herself, and the only obstacle standing in her way is her dangerously uncooperative new counterpart at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: bad-boy Russian Victor Kostenko.

The Russian Seduction is the first book in my Foreign Affairs series, and a far cry from the award-winning medieval and Renaissance romances I write under a pseudonym for a major press. Given my unusual background, I had lots of fun writing these Russia books. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I do. Why not stop by for a free peek here: http://www.allromanceebooks.com/produ...

And I love hearing from readers! If you like my Fan Page at www.facebook.com/NikkiNavarreAuthor, Rafflecopter might pick you for a free copy.

Happy reading!

Thanks so much for hosting me today at Ex Libris! I’m particularly excited about blogging for you, because your smart, sophisticated, international vibe perfectly suits my debut romantic suspense, The Russian Seduction. I sometimes describe the book as Casino Royale with a happy ending, and here’s a perfect opportunity to talk about why I say that.

Let me start with a confession: Daniel Craig seduced me into the spy business. Until his icy blond James Bond strode across the silver screen in his Armani tux, I was perfectly content writing historical romance under another name. But after five years as a diplomat in Russia, where I specialized in weapons of mass destruction, coupled with an early showing of Casino Royale that I caught in Bratislava, I was pretty well convinced I needed to write some sleek, sexy romantic suspense, spiced with state secrets, champagne and international intrigue. What started as a fun diversion from my dark Tudor romances turned into The Russian Seduction, the story of a renegade Russian submarine captain and a rising-star American diplomat, and the first book in my Foreign Affairs series for Affluent Press.

In the edgy, cosmopolitan world of modern-day Moscow, both Captain Victor Kostenko and Political Counselor Alexis Castle are convinced—with good reason—that the other is an intelligence agent with a hidden agenda. The fate of two nations rests on Alexis’s ability to establish a dialogue with the renegade captain. But given the risk that Victor is under orders to compromise her—not to mention the virtual certainty that they’re under surveillance—the sizzling chemistry between them is an itch she can’t afford to scratch.

I wrote Victor with Daniel Craig’s Bond in mind. His Bond is an icy, sometimes brutal, seemingly emotionless killer. Similarly, when Alexis meets Victor, “tremors of unease rippled through her at his nearness: an aggressive global power that was her country’s greatest rival, and he was breathing down her neck. A sleepless eye that watched in the deep, a cunning predator with infinite patience—and now he’d fixed his sights on her.” I wanted readers to feel the same frisson of excitement and danger from Victor that Daniel Craig conveys so effortlessly in the film.

Despite his ruthlessness and emotional detachment, James Bond’s intense but doomed love affair with ally-turned-adversary Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) also reveals emotional vulnerability. Vesper tells him, “You think of women as disposable treasures.” Bond makes a point of telling Vesper he prefers married women because the arrangement avoids emotional entanglement. Yet despite his checkered history, Bond falls in love with Vesper—counter to his inclinations, and completely outside his comfort zone. He reveals his love and vulnerability when he tells her, “I have no armor left. You’ve stripped it from me. Whatever I am, I’m yours. Is that enough for you?”

I gave Victor similar moments of vulnerability and exposure in The Russian Seduction, although it’s a side of him only Alexis gets to see. Victor reveals his attraction early, and the fact that Alexis unsettles him, when he asks, “Should I consider it mere coincidence that the government of the United States appointed you to become my counterpart: the woman they calculated I’d be least able to resist?” Later, by the time he knows he’s fallen for her—hard—this uber-confident, ex-Olympic athlete and adrenaline junkie is reduced to tongue-tied frustration. “Alexis, I can’t—I don’t want—damn it, I don’t know how to think about the future without you in it. I told you I’m a disaster at this. Do I have to spell it out?”
After the stunt he’s pulled, Alexis is more than happy to let Victor sweat a bit before she opens the door to their happily-ever-after.

Of course, the two don’t reach this point without plenty of thrills, chills, chases and escapes, in true 007 fashion. While the car chase in Casino Royale takes place at Miami Airport, Victor and Alexis burn rubber to escape their pursuers on the crowded streets of downtown Moscow in The Russian Seduction. In place of Bond’s hair-raising pursuit of an athletic, nearly airborne bomb maker through the hazards of an African construction site, Victor and Alexis leap from a speeding train to escape on foot through the Siberian tundra. The couple’s final confrontation with the villain takes place not in a Montenegrin casino, like Bond’s confrontation with poker genius Le Chiffre, but in a posh St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) nightclub where—despite the metal detector on the door—half the guests are armed.

I hope I’ve given you a bit of entertainment to savor over your vodka martini (shaken, not stirred). If you remember nothing else, my name is Navarre. Nikki Navarre.
I’d love to hear from you!

You can check out an excerpt from The Russian Seduction here: http://www.allromanceebooks.com/produ...

Nikki’s Coordinates:
Twitter: @Nikki_Navarre
Facebook: www.Facebook.com/NikkiNavarreAuthor
Website: www.LauraNavarre.com/book/Nikki-Navar....

(This blog first published for Stella Ex Libris.)

My debut romantic suspense The Russian Seduction is FREE to a lucky person who leaves a comment TODAY AND TOMORROW ONLYL (Mar. 2-3) at www.JustRomanticSuspense.com. Check out my guest blog on "My Life as a Spy" for your chance to win.

Bon chance!
Nikki

If you happened to catch my “Behind the Scenes” article in the November issue of Romantic Times, you already know I’m a former diplomat with weapons of mass destruction expertise who was stationed in Russia for several intriguing years. Although I worked for the U.S. Embassy, I lived in the open in a spacious city apartment in downtown Moscow. There, my two Siberian cats, my modern art collection and I shared many strange and exotic adventures.

It’s par for the course, toast for the caviar, steam for the banya that any diplomat living in Moscow deals with surveillance as a routine part of daily life. I grew accustomed to living my life—including my romantic life as a twenty-something singleton with a passion for clubs and parties—with an utter lack of privacy. The robust corps of beefcake Marines who provided our Embassy security represented the safest and least complicated dating option, and in those days I availed myself freely. But that sense of hostile eyes watching never let up.

I invoke that sense of hostile surveillance in The Russian Temptation, the new sexy spy romance in my Foreign Affairs series. That oppressive ambience of covert observation was never more pervasive than when duty brought me—legitimately and openly, with the goal of fostering international scientific collaboration—to the secret cities, where Temptation takes place. What in God’s name are the secret cities, you ask? They’re an archipelago of Soviet-era cities that don’t exist on any map, where the Soviets once designed their nuclear weapons and other apocalyptic nasties. The time-worn shadow of every cliché you’ve ever heard about the bad old days of the hammer and sickle still lingers in these remote locales, in this enigmatic land that the Western world with its myriad of twenty-first century challenges wants so desperately to forget.

Beyond adjusting to the uncomfortable realities of daily surveillance, I also had to deal with culture shock. I’d studied Russian language and culture for many years, but never visited the country before I moved there. At first, I was mildly shocked to observe men and women drinking openly on the streets, swigging cheerfully from bottles of foamy brown Russian beer in broad daylight. Later, I assimilated well enough to do it myself, and even to buy into the folk remedy of a shot of high-octane vodka and a lemon slice as an all-purpose cure for any garden-variety ailment.

My lungs adjusted to the thick, acrid haze of cigarette smoke that shrouded most Russian offices and restaurants. To this day, I can’t write a Russian hero who doesn’t smoke. If you’re a renegade Russian submarine captain like Victor Kostenko, you chain-smoke high-end Davidoffs without apology. If you’re a refined but lethal ex-KGB agent like Nikolai Markov, you savor an expensive Gauloise with your morning espresso. If you’re nightclub-hopping American me cruising through the high-end ethnic restaurants and lounges of contemporary Moscow, you smoke jasmine- and apple-flavored tobacco through a shisha—known elsewhere as a hookah or hubbly-bubbly—and enjoy the rush.

Another little adjustment in my new life was taking my Russian language skills out of the classroom and away from the negotiating table into the streets of downtown Moscow. I could speak with exquisite grammatical precision and a passable accent about nuclear weapons and arms control, but the slang of the old babushka at the grocery kiosk defeated me. My American heroines face similar trials when their heroes fire a barrage of machine-gun Russian calibrated to intimidate them. Of course, being heroines, they always rise to the challenge!

It took me a while to assimilate Russian superstitions, but some of them have stuck with me. Shaking hands across a threshold—a place rife with evil spirits in Russian myth—still bothers me, years after leaving the country for another exotic assignment. Whenever I buy a bouquet of flowers, I remember a particularly powerful Russian superstition: one only sends an even number of flowers when it’s a funeral. The quintessential romantic gesture of a dozen red roses would be received in Russia with superstitious dismay, while eleven roses would be graciously welcomed as a kingly gift. And who couldn’t appreciate the practical value of that worthy Russian tradition of sitting on your suitcase before you leave for a journey, to collect yourself and remember that crucial passport and visa you might have forgotten to pack?

A good rule of the road in any culture is never to overstay your welcome, so I’ll wrap this up. I hope you’ve enjoyed this virtual visit to modern-day Moscow! If you’re interested in hearing more about my adventures as a real-life diplomat in one of Europe’s most decadent, expensive and populous cities—a metropolis that has been called The Third Rome and The First Throne among other monikers over its thousand-year history—I’m hosting a Facebook gala on the same topic November 20 at www.Facebook.com/NikkiNavarreAuthor. Stop by and say privyet (hello), why don’t you?

Until then, it’s dos vidaniya (farewell for now) from your foreign correspondent!

Spy on me at www.lauranavarre.com/book/russian-tem....