December 21, 2020
Edgar winner Woods’s entertaining 56th Stone Barrington novel (after Shakeup) opens with the suave New York City attorney receiving an extortion letter on his computer demanding $1.5 million. Stone, who does consulting work for the CIA, calls his friend Lance Cabot, the CIA director, who dispatches Roxanne “Rocky” Hardwick, an attractive CIA operative, to Stone’s Manhattan townhouse to check out the computer. Rocky, with whom Stone is soon on intimate terms, helps determine that Russian thugs with a grudge against Stone are out to get him. A cat-and-mouse game ensues as Stone, with Rocky in tow, flies his private plane to places where he has second homes—first Paris and later the south of England—to evade his enemies. The tension rises as Stone and his allies prepare to meet the chief villain, a Russian known as the Greek, at a Manhattan restaurant to discuss a truce, but the main thrills come in the final chapters when the Greek and his henchmen invade the Maine island where Stone has a summer house. Woods smoothly blends lighthearted banter among Stone and his pals with deadly battles, whose casualties are nearly all generic bad guys. Series fans will eagerly await Stone’s next adventure. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit.
January 1, 2021
Stone Barrington is royally pissing off the Russian Mob. Not only does he respond rudely to their online extortionist, who demands a million dollars in Bitcoin to unfreeze his computers, but he has a history of besting the organization. The computer problem is solved with the help of CIA specialist Roxanne ""Rocky"" Hardwick, who soon becomes Barrington's bedmate, but the overall Mob situation is unresolved. With attempts being made on his life, Barrington calls on his considerable contacts and resources: the CIA, of which he's a deputy director; the NYPD, of which he's a former employee and whose commissioner, Dino Bacchetti, is Stone's closest friend; even his occasional lover, President Holly Barker, not to mention his personal plane and pilot and multiple residences in the U.S. and Europe, useful in trying to evade would-be assassins. When two of the Pentkovsky brothers, who head the Russian Mob, are taken out by ex-CIA operative Ed Rawls, a violent man known as The Greek succeeds them, and a truce is arranged with Barrington, but will the arrangement be honored by both sides? Prime escapism from a master of the genre.
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