Giants in the Shadows (1979)

The third volume of Gloria Vitanza Basile's Manipulators trilogy, after The Manipulators and Born to Power, sets the Erice family against IAGO, an international cartel of power brokers, in a story that runs from a Middle Eastern crisis to Washington and Las Vegas. Tina Erice, the only daughter and heiress of Valentino Erice, numbed by her parents' deaths and the end of her affair with Senator Whip Shiverton, takes up her father's place in the shadow of the double-headed griffin. (Open Library)

Watches

Corum watch: Three days after settling on her mission to Italy, and after Richie, who calls her father his don, drives her to Kennedy Airport and watches the 747 taxi out thinking that an era ended when Val died, Tina is lulled toward sleep by the aircraft's drone. Her eyes read the time on her solid gold, diamond-studded Corum: four more hours to Rome. She slips a leather marker into her book and closes her eyes, a woman walking in the shadow of the double-headed griffin. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: The monotonous droning sounds of the 747 were lulling Tina to sleep. Her eyes read the time on her solid gold, diamond-studded Corum watch. Four more hours to Rome, she thought, slipping a leather marker between the pages of the book she was reading and closing her eyes. (Gloria Vitanza Basile, Giants in the Shadows, scan cataloged as Pinnacle Books, 1979, p. 415; the cast list in the front matter names Tina Erice; Internet Archive scan OCR)