Season of Betrayal (2006)

Margaret Lowrie Robertson's first novel is set in Beirut in 1983, where Lara McCauley arrives with her husband Mac, an American magazine correspondent, as the Marines are sent in as peacekeepers. Lara is an outsider in a city at war and in a marriage that is quietly coming apart; the story opens with her watching a videotape of a man named Thomas being hanged. (Open Library)

Watches

Tissot (unidentified model): On the morning after her birthday, which Mac spent on the phone to New York, Lara finds an unwrapped silver Palestinian bracelet on her pillow and hugs him for it, but she hardly wears jewelry, only her wedding ring and the gold Tissot that Barrett McCauley paid a lot for in the Vienna duty-free on his way back from Poland, telling her gold suited a pale complexion. Crossing to Beirut she slides the bracelet into the Mediterranean; Mac never notices. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: This wasn't the morning to pick a fight, but the truth was I hardly wore jewelry, just my wedding ring and the Tissot watch Mac paid a lot of money for in the Vienna duty-free during the layover on his way back from Poland. Gold, not silver. (Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal, scan cataloged as Tatra Press, 2006, p. 4, OCR line-break hyphen closed up; Mac gives his full name on p. 3 and the jacket copy names Lara; Internet Archive scan OCR)