The Casanova Embrace

The Casanova Embrace is Warren Adler’s 1978 political-thriller novel, his second post-Undertow book and a precise demonstration of why his work is durable. Eduardo Allesandro Palmero, a Chilean dissident exiled to Washington after the 1973 Pinochet coup, has spent his last year systematically seducing six American women (including a senator’s wife, a CIA analyst’s wife, and a State Department secretary), each chosen for what she could give him. He is killed in a car bombing. The novel is Federal Bureau of Investigation handler Frederick Diem reconstructing what Palmero was actually doing.

Adler writes the surveillance procedural with quiet authority. The 1970s Washington of the book is recognizably the Washington that produced All the President’s Men: dingy walk-ups in Georgetown, telephone wires-tapped routine, the specific bureaucratic cadences of FBI-CIA interagency caution. The seduction set pieces are sharper than the genre usually permits, partly because Adler keeps Palmero’s interiority opaque and lets the women’s POV sections carry the emotional weight. The result is a novel that uses Cold War tradecraft as a chassis for a study of how women in 1970s Washington were systematically underestimated.

Recommended for fans of mid-Cold War political fiction (Joseph Hone, Charles McCarry, Alan Furst’s later work), and for readers looking for books like The Casanova Embrace at the intersection of espionage and infidelity novel. Four stars, and a Warren Adler title that has aged better than most of his contemporaries.