Rules for the Road

Book excerpt: Most travelers leave home Monday morning for a work week in the Chicago office saying "Love yah, see you Friday." The hero in Rules for the Road is a quantum leap from that lucky character. Last Friday afternoon he kissed his wife passionately and said, "Love you, hope to see you before next month arrives." You don't fly home on Friday afternoons when you find yourself halfway around the world. We join our hero on a train in China headed for Nanjing where he and his team are about to begin another round of negotiations with a Chinese company to enter into a joint venture. The meetings, however, quickly take a back seat to the culture of the people, their mannerisms, food, drink and the winsome ways of their women with a personal agenda. When the trip gets extended by an extra week and a half, his life and the temptations of the flesh become almost intolerable. Our loving husband finds himself swept up in dangerous events that he has neither contemplated nor imagined. In other words, the magnetism of his personality has a precarious impact on the women he meets: this Svengali makes swooning ladies act out naughty thoughts.