Foul Play

August 2, 2021
At the outset of bestseller Woods’s enjoyable 59th Stone Barrington novel, attorney Stone welcomes a new client, Shep Troutman, whom he first rescues from an assailant near his Manhattan townhouse. Shep, who’s staying at the Carlyle Hotel and recently sold his family’s design and manufacturing business for $260 million, needs Stone’s advice. The morning after their meeting, Shep is mugged in Central Park. While Shep is being treated for minor injuries at the hospital, someone leaves the dead body of a prostitute in his apartment at the Carlyle. Shep finally admits to Stone that he suspects the shady buyer of the family business, Gregor Kronk, has reason to be dissatisfied and is behind the mayhem. Stone puts his own life in peril as he tries to protect Shep and fend off Kronk. Woods throws in more than one surprising twist and a tantalizing hint of future developments in Stone’s relationship with his paramour, U.S. president Holly Barker. In the end, Stone devises a clever and fitting way to take care of Kronk. This is a good entry point for newcomers to this long-running series. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

August 15, 2021
A new client spells nothing but trouble for Stone Barrington and himself. Now that he's sold his family business for $250 million, Shepherd Troutman has come to New York to spread his wings. And it's hard to imagine any person in fiction or real life better able to help him spend gobs of money than Stone. Before he can start signing those checks for the Bentley and the suite at the Carlyle Hotel, though, Shep has to get rescued from outside Stone's Turtle Bay home, where a masked thug has beaten him senseless, and from any suspicion of having strangled the nameless call girl who turns up in his suite at the Carlyle--an episode that makes him think twice about that particular purchase. As the attacks continue, it becomes clear that someone has it in for Shep, and the someone, under the fig-leaf disguise of a Delaware corporation, is Russian mobster Gregor Kronk. There's no negotiating with Kronk, Stone's security advisers tell him after he's spirited Shep and Roderick Troutman, the father who faked his own death in order to avoid involvement, out of New York; the only sane strategy is to give him what he wants, a series of patents worth another $250 million. Naturally, this perfectly reasonable advice grates on Stone, and the battle between good and evil is on once again, this time with two pleasing novelties: a plot twist most readers won't see coming (and some won't believe even after it arrives) and a focus, increasingly rare in Woods' thrillers-by-the-yard, on actually unfolding a single sustained narrative with limited interruptions for sex, posturing, upscale spending, and loose ends. Stone's least indulgent adventure in years. Never say never!

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