Below the Belt

November 21, 2016
At the start of bestseller Woods’s thrilling 40th Stone Barrington novel (after 2016’s Dishonorable Intentions), the debonair New York lawyer agrees to do a favor for his friend former U.S. president Will Lee, who’s visiting Santa Fe, N.Mex., where Stone has just bought a house. All Stone has to do is drive into the nearby mountains and retrieve a strong case (a sort of high security suitcase) from another ex-president, Joe Adams, and deliver it to Will at the Santa Fe opera after that night’s performance. When a rock slide on the mountain road prevents Stone from making his rendezvous, he ends up spending a lot of time looking after the strong case, which contains a retired CIA agent’s memoir with explosive secrets. One person whose reputation could suffer from the memoir’s revelations is charismatic Nelson Knott, who’s considering a run for president as a third-party candidate—and whose wealthy supporters are prepared to go to any lengths on his behalf. Woods keeps the suspense high all the way to the dramatic conclusion. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit.

December 15, 2016
A favor New York attorney Stone Barrington agrees to do for a friend who's a powerful political veteran causes an unexpected amount of grief to everyone but Stone. Joe Adams used to be vice president and then, more briefly, president. Now that the Alzheimer's that took him out of politics is finally catching up with him, he wants Stone to take custody of a dauntingly reinforced briefcase filled with--well, he won't say exactly what. It turns out that an awful lot of other people are interested in the contents of that case, from former Russian CIA mole Ed Rawls, who's been living below the radar near Stone's Maine digs, to Christian St. Clair, who's willing to spend a significant fraction of his obscene wealth to bankroll the presidential campaign of online entrepreneur Nelson Knott. As Knott launches the Independent Patriot Party, which promises to take an outsider's wrecking ball to the D.C. establishment, diverse hirelings' increasingly determined attempts to wrest the locked case away from Stone make him wonder whether its contents could compromise his old friend Kate Lee's re-election bid--or whether the threat is to Knott's own straight-shooting candidacy. The stakes are so high that Stone has hardly a free moment to propose marriage to CIA chief Holly Barker, the most durable of his recent stable of lovers, before dashing the hopes of the would-be thieves for good. An unusually strong premise, and this time Woods keeps his eye on the ball, ignoring the siren call of consumer spending that sank Sex, Lies & Serious Money (2016) and so many others, plotting as if he actually means it. Warning, though: some ripped-from-the-headlines elements may extend fans' post-election blues.

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December 1, 2016
Woods brings back several recurring characters in this political novel in which art comes to imitate life. At the request of former President Will Lee, Stone Barrington acquires a case containing an explosive manuscript written by brilliant exCIA agent Ed Rawls, who was erroneously imprisoned as a Russian mole and later pardoned by Lee. (Rawls also had been the CIA mentor of Will's wife, Kate, the current president, who's planning to run for reelection.) Just after Stone gets the case, he finds that he's being followed by agents of mega-wealthy Christian St. Clair, a charming man who aims to buy a president, in the person of businessman Nelson Knott, and will go to any lengths to achieve his goal. But some of what Rawls has documented concerns less-than-savory aspects of Knott's past, and there's a potentially lethal race with Barrington's forces to see who will prevail. Woods is compulsively readable, even as he churns out three novels a year, so a slip on the last page is easy to forgive and doesn't really lessen the pleasure of the journey in this easy-reading page-turner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2016

Another Stone Barrington adventure, and no word yet on plot, but with over 1.2 million copies of novels by Woods sold in 2015 it doesn't really matter.

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