The Tinder-Box (1989)

Paul Stanley's novel, published by Robert Hale in 1989, sends Galina Romanova, a United Nations interpreter who believes in the organization's mission, from her Manhattan life to Geneva to work the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, where she meets a man who will stop at nothing to wield sinister influence at the UN; the jacket links an upright official in Nicaragua, a greedy Polish ex-cop in New York, an unscrupulous Geneva confectioner and a Cuban jailbird in Zurich. (Open Library)

Watches

Omega (unidentified model): Swissair flight 101 from New York touches down at Geneva's Cointrin airport at precisely ten past seven in the morning by Captain Knoepfli's infallible Omega, twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and the captain announces the fact over the intercom in an accent the text spells out. Galina Romanova, putting her book away, has heard of the legendary precision of the Swiss and finds this an aberration, punctuality run amok. A Swiss airline captain's Omega is the novel's first image of the country. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Swissair flight 101 from New York touched down at Geneva airport at precisely ten past seven in the morning, according to Captain Knoepfli's infallible Omega watch. (Paul Stanley, The Tinder-Box, scan cataloged as Robert Hale, 1989, p. 15; the Linford large-print edition of 2000 has the sentence on p. 21; Internet Archive scan OCR)