SUMMARY:
Now working for the CIA, ex-chief-of-police Holly Barker joins the elite task force tracking Teddy Fay-a man who kills his political targets for sport. As he begins to pick off America's enemies one by one, Holly unexpectedly finds herself face-to-face with the killer, kick-starting a high-speed chase through the streets of Manhattan.

From Kirkus Reviews

Even though Stone Barrington is back from the Caribbean (Dead in the Water, 1997), the debonair attorney-adventurer seems to spend half his time, as the title indicates, in the waterthough mostly, like the book, treading water or plain floundering. A panicked call from movie star Vance Calder, who married Stone's longtime lover Arrington Carter three months ago, tells Stone that Arrington has disappeared and begs him for help. But by the time Centurion Studios' private jet lands Stone in La-La Land, Vance is singing another tune: Arrington's fine, she's just overwhelmed by her pregnancy, she's gone away to think things over, she's phoning Vance every day. The first, vastly more entertaining half of the resulting tale is nothing more than a series of artless detours away from Arrington, each detour paved with superlatives. Stone presses flesh with wheeler-dealer David Sturmack, the most powerful man in Hollywood. Centurion boss Louis Regenstein, who thinks Stone would make a great actor, gets him a screen test, the best anybody's ever seen. Even the folks in wardrobe rave. (Stone's a perfect 42 Long.) Meantime, Stone's struck up intimate relations with two strikingly beautiful women whose deepest loyalties arent to him. He's also taken an instant suspicion to big-time banker Onofrio Ippolitoand so have we, thanks to a heavy-handed prologue that showed Stone plummeting to a watery grave, courtesy of the Ippolito anchor he's chained to. Once Stone gets loose from that anchor, it's time for the second, far more obligatory installment, as he sets about rescuing Arrington, who's obviously been kidnaped, and tracing the crime (and many others) to Ippolito, Sturmack, and Co., with the help of some antique trickery (rescues from sinking ships, bullet-firing pens) that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow in the earliest James Bond films. Such leftovers don't make very tasty or nutritious fare, not even when the virtues of every predictable scrap are extolled at the top of the author's stentorian voice.(Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection; $250,000 ad/promo) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Kirkus Reviews

Erratic Woods, whose 18 previous thrillers make up perhaps the spottiest backlist in the business, nose-dives in this plush, absurd slice of Serial Killer Lite. The morning after cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington (Swimming to Catalina, 1998, etc.) returns from getting takeout Chinese for Susan Bean, the comely ADA who picked him up at a party, to find her throat cut, he learns that his secretary, Alma Hodges, has been killed on the street outside his place. Next, Stone's neighbor, bank VP Miranda Hirsch, is slain while he and his ex-partner, Lt. Dino Bacchetti, alertly watch her vacuum her apartment in the nude, and Dino's wife Mary Ann barely escapes with her life from another lethal attack. Clearly, the boys decide, somebody they put away once is out to kill everybody close to them. How does Stone feel about all this mayhem? ``I'm extremely well,'' he tells painter Sarah Buckminster the next morning on her return from Europe, and why not? After all, his immediate future holds impulse cash purchases of an armored Mercedes and a terrific little cottage in Connecticut, not to mention some fabulous sex with Sarah, who's inspired this shopping spree. And when Sarah, worn down by the rigors of the stalked life in New York, returns to her native England, leaving Stone to help Dino deal with the stalker, Dino's sister-in-law, Mafia princess Dolce Bianchi, is waiting in the wings to take up the slack in Stone's love life. Meanwhile, the presumed perp, wife-killing accountant Herbert Mitteldorfer, has been released from prison just in time to slow his murderous campaign to an adagio while Stone catches up on the finer things in life and, aided by Dolce's flashing eyes, fends off his ex-girlfriend Arrington Carter's tearful confession that she wants to leave her movie-star husband and baby son and come back to him. Male fantasy at its most narcissistic, with just enough mystery to substitute for foreplay. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

The pain lay buried somewhere in the depths of Stone Barrington's upper body; a cross between a slipped disc and a coronary, it seemed. It had begun after a phone conversation early in the previous winter. The call, from Arrington Carter, had ended everything. Now she was the wife of another man, living in his house, rearing his son. He would never see her again, except in her husband's company, and he would never think of her again without feeling the pain.

He had never believed it would persist into the following spring, but it had. If anything, it was worse. He saw Dino a couple of times a week, always at Elaine's. Dino was his closest friend--sometimes, he felt, his only friend. Not true, of course. Elaine was his friend, and the evenings in her restaurant, with Elaine and Dino, were the only bright spots in his week. His law practice had lately been boring, a personal injury suit that dragged on and on, a bone thrown to him by Woodman & Weld, because there wasn't enough meat on it to nourish a firm with thirty partners and a hundred associates. They were ready to go to trial, and the expected settlement offer had not materialized. It was depressing. Everything was depressing. And the pain continued, assuaged only by bourbon, and he had done too much assuaging lately. He sat at table number five, at Elaine's, with Dino, and ordered another assuagement.

"Let's go to a party," Dino said. "Have your next one there."

"I don't feel like going to a party with a lot of cops," Stone said.

"It's not a cop party."

"You don't know anybody but cops," Stone said.

Dino caught the waiter's eye and signaled for a check. "I know lots of people," he said.

"Name three who aren't cops or Mafiosi."

"It's not a Mafia party, either," Dino said, dodging the question.

"Whose party is it?"

"It's at a deputy DA's."

"Oh. Then we get to bring our own booze."

"His name is Martin B-r-o-u-g-h-a-m," he spelled, "pronounced 'Broom,' and he's got some money, I think."

"Isn't he handling the Dante trial?" Dante was a crime boss, and his trial was the most important since Gotti's.

"He got a conviction this afternoon."

"I hadn't heard."

"Don't you watch the news anymore?"

"Not much."

"The party is to celebrate the conviction."

"How come I don't know Brougham?"

"Because he runs with a classier crowd than you're accustomed to. The only seedy lawyers he meets are in court."

"Who are you calling a seedy lawyer?"

"How many lawyers are at this table?"

"I am not a seedy lawyer; I just take seedy cases. There's a difference."

"Whatever you say," Dino said, standing up and reaching for his raincoat. "Let's get out of here."

"I don't want to," Stone grumbled.

"You don't want to do anything, you desolate fuck, and I can't stand it anymore. Now put your coat on and come with me, or I'll just shoot you here and now. Nobody would ever prosecute me; it would be justifiable homicide."

"Oh, all right," Stone said, struggling to his feet and grabbing his coat. "One drink, if the guy serves decent booze. Then I'm out of there."

The apartment was a duplex in the East Sixties, definitely not the preserve of an assistant DA.

"You're right," Stone said, as they handed their coats to a maid. "He's got money. There's at least a million dollars of art hanging in this room."

"What are you, his insurance agent?" Dino whispered. "Try and have a good time, okay?"

"Tell me more about this guy," Stone said.

"Word is, he's up for chief deputy DA, and he's going to run for DA, if the old man ever retires."

"He'll grow old waiting," Stone said.

A handsome man of about forty spotted Dino and came across the room, towing a tall blond woman in a Chanel suit.

"Dino," he said, shaking hands. "I'm glad you could make it. You remember Dana."

The woman shook Dino's hand. "Who's this?" she asked, turning her gaze on Stone.

"This is Stone Barrington, Dana. Stone, this is Martin and Dana Brougham."

"How do you do?" Stone said mechanically, shaking their hands.

"I've heard of you," Brougham said, steering Stone and Dino toward the bar. "You were Dino's partner at the Nineteenth Precinct a while back, weren't you?"

"A while back," Stone echoed. "After I left the force they had to kick him upstairs; nobody else would ride in the same car with him."

"You're over at Woodman and Weld, aren't you?"

"I'm of counsel, to them," Stone replied, "but Woodman and Weld would probably rather you didn't know it." It was a remark he wouldn't have made if he had been entirely sober.

Brougham laughed. "What are you drinking?"

"Wild Turkey on the rocks, if you have it."

Brougham grabbed a bottle that looked like a crystal decanter and poured Stone a double. "This is Wild Turkey, but it's got a leg up on the standard stuff."

Stone tasted the whiskey. The man was right. This stuff cost thirty bucks a bottle; he was beginning to like Brougham.

A couple arrived at the front door, and Brougham went off to greet them. "Wander around," he said. "Meet some people."

Stone looked around. The room was jammed with people, and somebody was playing the piano rather well. "I see at least four cops," he said to Dino.

A brand-new page-turning Holly Barker novel from the perennially entertaining New York Times-bestselling author Stuart Woods.

After Special Agent Holly Barker lets international terrorist Teddy Fay slip through her fingers for a second time, the CIA thinks she might want a long vacation, at least until Teddy is captured and the bad publicity has blown over. So Holly returns to her hometown of Orchid Beach, Florida, where she had been police chief for many years. But a very unpleasant surprise awaits her. Many years earlier, Holly and another female army officer had brought charges against their commanding officer for sexual harassment, attempted rape, and rape. Holly had managed to fight him off, but the other woman, a young lieutenant, had not. The officer in question was acquitted of all charges, and has also left the army – for a job as Orchid Beach 's new police chief.

Will Holly return to the CIA? Or will she challenge her old nemesis for control of the Orchid Beach Police Department?