Publisher's Weekly Review
Hollywood producer Billy Barnett (aka former CIA agent Teddy Faye) takes center stage in bestseller Woods's inventive 44th Stone Barrington novel (after 2017's Quick & Dirty), while Stone offers guidance from the sidelines. After a drunk driver kills Billy's wife while she's crossing the street in Beverly Hills, Billy takes a leave of absence from his studio and starts driving east. He ends up stopping in Santa Fe, N.Mex., where, coincidentally, nasty film mogul Dax Baxter, the husband of the woman who ran down his wife, is making a western. Dax has the connections to ensure that his wife, now in rehab, doesn't get prosecuted. Under yet another alias, Billy succeeds in securing a job on Dax's movie and starts exacting his revenge in small ways on the set. After figuring out that Billy is a threat and why, Dax hires a Russian thug to take care of him. Thanks to his CIA training, Billy proves more than a match for the bad guys as the action escalates in a series of tit-for-tat reprisals. Newcomers will find this installment an easy entry into Woods's alluring world of wealth, power, and crime. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Invincible New York attorney Stone Barrington (Quick Dirty, 2017, etc.) is shoved to the sidelines by even more formidable ex-CIA agent Teddy Fay, now operating under the names Billy Barnett when he's producing films for Centurion Studios and Ted Shirley when he's seeking full-throated revenge.Whatever impulses toward social compliance may have survived Teddy's checkered earlier adventures (Smooth Operator, with Parnell Hall, 2017, etc.) are instantly killed off when he's widowed by the wife of dislikable Hollywood producer Dax Baxter, who runs over Teddy's own wife after a "three-cosmo lunch" and then retreats into a private clinic to escape prosecution. Asking his boss, Stone's son Peter, for a leave of absence, Teddy drives to Santa Fe, where, as Ted Shirley, he gets himself hired on Baxter's latest shoot. Sensing danger, Baxter hires Russian assassin Dimitri Kasov to neutralize Teddy, but he's no more successful than Baxter's own bodyguards were. When Teddy, unmasked but undimmed in his resolve, heads back to Los Angeles with Sally Ryder, whom he's picked up at the shoot, in tow, Baxter redoubles his efforts to have him killed. Despite Teddy's well-honed survival skills, all might be lost if it weren't for the timely intervention of Sgt. Carlos Rivera, who works the auto theft detail for the Beverly Hills PD. Carlos gets into the middle of this battle royal in a most unlikely way, but once he's established himself firmly there, fans will recognize that there's no hope for Baxter or anyone he hires in the high-fatality rounds that follow.As uncertain in its pacing and structure as a Road Runner cartoonyou just never know who'll be abruptly discarded and who'll turn out to matter in the Woods worldand equally formulaic in the conduct of individual episodes and the final outcome. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Lawyer, ladies' man, and serial bon vivant Stone Barrington lies low in his forty-fourth outing. Film producer Billy Barnett's wife was killed when the drunk wife of media mogul Dan Baxter ran her down. Baxter used his clout to shield his wife from punishment, but now Barnett (or Teddy Fay, as he was known in his CIA days) seems intent on taking justice into his own hands. When Barnett arrives in Santa Fe using another alias, old friend Barrington smells trouble. There is less focus on Barrington's lavish lifestyle this time and more on the movie set, but it's still all about the rich and famous, which has proved a winning formula for genre perennial Woods.--Keefe, Karen Copyright 2017 Booklist
