Thoroughly enjoyable book. Melanie Royce visits her younger sister, Cecily, in Spain. A day before the sisters are to fly home to the States, Cecily is kidnapped. Melanie, alone and scared in a strange country, is offered help from Cecily’s history professor, Teo Sanlucar, whom she had met briefly once before. She’s not sure if his offer is genuine or if he is somehow involved in the kidnapping.

This was a captivating story that was very unpredictable. The settings were terrific in Pamplona (during the festival of San Fermin) and the Basque Country. The scenes that took place during the running of the bulls and subsequent bullfight really came alive and made me feel as though I was there. Great descriptions and tension throughout. The heroine was sympathetic and smart and the hero was a handsome, mysterious man of many secrets. Loved it! ( )

This well-written Intrigue is set in Spain, where Melanie Royce is visiting her half-sister, Cecily, who is a student in Madrid. Melanie and Cecily are due to travel home together to visit their wealthy, socialite parents, despite Cecily’s continued protests that she does not want to go home to Cleveland for the summer. Melanie suspects her reticence is caused by her relationship with a fellow student named Carlos, about whom Cecily will say very little. When Cecily disappears the morning of their scheduled departure, Melanie believes her stubborn sister has run off with her boyfriend. But signs of a struggle, and some feelings of definite wrongness persuade her that she must do her best to find out for certain what happened to Cecily.
She turns to one of the few people she has met in Spain, one of Cecily’s professors, Teo Sanlucar. Despite her suspicions of the man, he’s the only hope she has of finding her sister, who she believes to be in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. After a few days of searching, a man, another Basque like Teo and Carlos, contacts Melanie with a ransom demand. It seems more and more likely to Melanie that the handsome professor is in league with the kidnappers and holding Melanie prisoner in his uncle’s home while his comrades hold her sister at another location.
Descriptions of the Spanish countryside, Pamplona, the festival, and even bullfights take up a lot of the book, but curiously in a way that doesn’t detract from the action. While I would hesitate to call it an edge-of-you-seat thriller, the novel is very vivid, the plot decent, the characters good, the description excellent, and it is an overall good read. Also, unlike some Intrigues of this vintage, this one remains quite tolerable for today’s reader almost two decades after it was published. ( )