You’ve probably noticed his books dominating the “W” section of your neighborhood bookstore. But assuming you’ve gone through life this long without ever having read any Stuart Woods, the folks at Harper, his long-time publisher, are giving you another chance by reissuing his Stone Barrington series in “Premium Paperback” format (that’s slightly larger than your typical mass-market format, and going for $9.99 a pop).
You can start right at the beginning, with 1991′s NEW YORK DEAD, and then choose your pick of later titles, like say DEAD IN THE WATER. Here’s what you’ll find.
NEW YORK DEAD opens with New York cop Stone Barrington at his favorite bar late one night. After nursing his bullet-damaged knee and his last drink, he decides to walk home. But suddenly, a few blocks out, the body of a woman falls in front of him from 12 stories up.
And not just any woman — it’s Sasha Nijinsky, network TV’s beautiful and popular anchorwoman. An ambulance is called and Barrington runs into the building to investigate how she fell, but he loses a suspect in the chase. What’s worse, he loses Nijinsky. En route to the hospital, her ambulance collides with a fire truck, and now she’s officially missing.
Barrington and his partner immediately head up an investigation to not only find Nijinsky, but to determine if she is even alive. Along the way, they uncover a myriad of personal secrets about their prime suspects and Nijinsky herself. When Barrington refuses to support a specific suspect that the rest of the force likes for the murder, he is forced into retirement on a trumped-up medical release.
But he soon is hired as an investigator for a prestigious legal firm, and Barrington sweetens the situation by finally taking the bar exam and becoming a lawyer himself. While he is no longer a cop, the Nijinsky case refuses to leave him alone until he solves it.
By the time of 1997′s DEAD IN THE WATER, Barrington is comfortably settled into his dual role of investigator/lawyer and looking forward to a winter getaway on the Caribbean island of St. Marks with his live-in girlfriend. But she never makes it, due to a sudden work assignment, followed by a blizzard preventing flights leaving New York.
Barrington keeps himself busy, however, when he notices a beautiful blonde removed from her nearby yacht and taken into custody. Turns out she is Allison Manning, wife of a rich and successful American novelist, and she is being accused of murdering her husband and tossing his body overboard. But Allison insists that her spouse died of a heart attack and she buried his body at sea before docking at St. Marks.
Barrington decides to help her in her murder trial, but he is up against the odd, antiquated judicial system of the small island, where the local prosecutor sees the trial as his chance to further his political career. Nonetheless, Barrington mounts a publicity campaign to disgrace the system while building what he feels is an airtight case. That is, until it all falls apart.
Woods has little use for interior information or motivation, so most of what we know about Barrington and the other characters in these novels is spoken out loud. It certainly moves the plot along, but keeps things very much on the surface and allows for several overly long stretches of backstory dialogue.
But the author also loves wild, unexpected plot twists. Trouble is, the kind he favors make you doubt the believability of the story immediately after they surprise you. This is especially true of NEW YORK DEAD, where the multiple revelations about the suspects and victim are not only far-flung, but seemingly pulled out of thin air. By DEAD IN THE WATER, Woods has calmed down a bit, and the twists, while still implausible, occur more naturally from the plot.
So should you take on Woods if you haven’t already? Depends. Barrington is far from infallible, but still more surface than substance. But if you are looking for quick-fix mysteries that don’t bother with lots of characterization, and straddle the fence between investigative procedurals and legal dramas (often in the same book), and are full of wild-hair plot twists that are prone to make you giggle rather than gasp, then by all means enjoy!
You’ll find the rest of us browsing titles a bit earlier in the alphabet. —Alan Cranis
Related posts:
- The Water Room
- Death at Dark Water
- Water Like a Stone
- The Dead Man’s Brother
- Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead
