Mounting Fears

November 17, 2008
In bestseller Woods’s uninspired sixth Will Lee thriller (after Capital Crimes
), the incumbent U.S. president, William Jefferson Lee, faces a series of crises in an election year: his vice president has died during surgery; a nuclear warhead is missing in Pakistan and believed to be in the hands of a terrorist group possibly connected to al-Qaeda; and an independent presidential candidate, a charismatic minister, has erased Lee’s once significant lead in the polls. To make matters worse, Lee’s newly appointed vice president, the former governor of California, has got himself entangled in a messy divorce as well as a sordid love triangle that, if exposed, could become front-page fodder for the tabloids and all but destroy Lee’s re-election bid. While Woods exhibits his usual brilliant sense of pacing, two-dimensional characters, a mechanical plot and an improbable ending far from satisfy.

Stuart Woods is such a prolific author that it's tough to keep up. Here's another winner. MOUNTING FEARS follows President Will Lee and his CIA director wife, Kate Rule, as they deal with threats at home and on foreign soil. Woods veteran Carrington MacDuffie once again proves to be the perfect choice to perform the novel. MacDuffie is as unflappable as the president she portrays. Dropping her voice ever so slightly, she is entirely believable in her male roles. She portrays President Lee as one cool customer as he juggles a terrorist takeover of a Pakistani nuclear facility and the return of a deranged serial killer--who happens to be one of his fans. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine