April 25, 2016
Boris Tirov, the hapless villain of Edgar-winner Woods’s diverting 38th Stone Barrington novel (after Family Jewels), detests Stone, a suave, well-connected New York City attorney whose latest lady friend happens to be Boris’s ex-wife, screenwriter Gala Wilde. Stone flies his private jet to Santa Fe, N.Mex., where Gala has a house, and later to England, where Stone owns an estate with its own airfield, but the vengeful Boris, a Hollywood movie producer with rumored connections to the Russian mob, remains hot on their trail. The ease with which Stone keeps Boris at bay threatens to become monotonous until Boris cuts a deal with Russian president Viktor Petrov: in exchange for Petrov not extraditing Boris from the U.S. on a long-standing murder charge, Boris will ensure that Petrov has an intimate meeting with a beautiful American actress who’s due to arrive in Moscow for a movie premiere. Woods leaves this intriguing plot line up in the air, presumably to be continued in a later installment, as the main action speeds toward Boris’s final, foolish attempt to get even with Stone. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit.