The Race for Autumn's Glory (1997)

Doris Elaine Fell's 1997 novel in her Seasons of Intrigue series sets bomb threats against the Tour de France beside a mole hunt, with the CIA officer Drew Gregory trying to clear the embassy secretary Lennie Applegate of selling secrets. The proof that someone else is involved turns out to be on a man's wrist. (Open Library)

Watches

Zodiac watch: Radburn Parker twists the band of his Zodiac while inviting himself to dinner with Drew Gregory. Going through surveillance photographs that show Lennie Applegate with a man whose face is always out of frame, Drew notices her fingers resting on a wrist that wears a blue Zodiac like Parker's, and his colleague Vic recalls that Lennie gave Parker such a watch for his birthday. Parker has already cursed himself: he left his Cambridge ring and diamond cuff links at home but wore the watch out of habit. In the Paris climax Chase Evans bites his wrist just above it. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Parker glanced at his watch and cursed himself for wearing it. He had removed his Cambridge ring before leaving London and even remembered to leave his favorite diamond cuff links at home. But automatically he had worn the Zodiac, Lennie's birthday gift to him. (Doris Elaine Fell, The Race for Autumn's Glory, scan cataloged as Thorndike Press (large print), 1999, p. 319, where the scan prints a dash after "Zodiac"; the watch is first seen on p. 310, identified in the photograph on p. 318 and mentioned again on p. 575; Internet Archive scan OCR)