Nine (2002)

Jan Burke's first stand-alone thriller follows Everett Corey, heir to an enormous fortune and leader of a small circle of wealthy young men he calls Project Nine, who kill in the name of vengeance, and the sheriff's department detective Alex Brandon, who first arrested Everett at fourteen and now works the case with a difficult new partner. (Open Library)

Watches

Omega (unidentified model): Alone in his hillside home after watching the news coverage of his latest work, Everett glances at his Omega, locks the videotape in a hidden safe and crosses the lawn to the mansion. Upstairs he showers, changes into clothes bought in Berlin, puts on plain-lensed glasses and opens a drawer of Tag Heuer, Rolex, Raymond Weil and other fine timepieces, including a few vintage Hamilton railroad pocket watches; he takes off the Omega and replaces it with an inexpensive watch on a plastic band bought near a German university, and Project Nine is in motion again. The drawer's other watches are owned, not worn. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He opened a drawer that contained Tag Heuer, Rolex, Raymond Weil, and other fine timepieces, including a few vintage Hamilton railroad pocket watches. He took off the Omega and replaced it with an inexpensive watch with a plastic band, which he had purchased at a shop near a German university. (Jan Burke, Nine, scan cataloged as Pocket Books, 2002, pp. 34 to 35, a sentence across the page break; he glances at the Omega on p. 34 and is named on p. 29; the copyright page gives the 2002 first edition; Internet Archive scan OCR)