"Barrington goes espionage"
Stone Barrington serves of counsel to the New York law firm
of Woodman & Weld, which means they are one step removed
from any dirty work that has to be done for their high
paying clients. Stone is asked to find someone to take
pictures of Lawrence Fortescue cheating on his heiress wife
so that, according to the terms of the prenuptial
agreement, she can get a divorce and not pay him a cent in
alimony. While the man Stone hires takes pictures, he has
dinner with Carpenter, a beautiful espionage agent he met
in England last year. When Stone retrieves the pictures, Carpenter recognizes
Lawrence as one of the agents in her unit who quit the
service. The woman in the picture Marie-Therese, a deadly
assassin who blends as well as a chameleon into her
surroundings killed him. She has a vendetta against those
people in Carpenter's unit and has killed most of them with
the exception of three people. Carpenter intends to get
her before Marie-These kills her but Stone is the wild card
in this spy game with no rules. The protagonist of this novel stays true to his own moral
code even if it means working against his current lover.
Stone brings a touch of class to the spy game, not waiting
for foreign nationals who are supposedly the good guys, to
make a hit on American soil. The antagonist of this
thriller is easy to understand and even sympathetic when
she agrees to a truce that Stone arranges. Stuart Woods
knows how to tell a good story while showing his audience
just how ugly the spy game can get. Harriet Klausner
Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted March 20, 2003
SummaryBack in New York City after the London adventures of The
Short Forever, cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington is
approached by a colleague at the firm of Woodman & Weld who
needs help with a celebrity divorce case. Heiress Elena
Marks needs proof of her layabout husband's infidelity
before she can begin divorce proceedings. When the
undercover work Stone sets up turns dirty-and catastrophic-
leaving the errant husband dead and the mystery woman gone
without a trace, Stone must clear his own good name and
find a killer hiding among the glitterati of New York's
high society.
Carpenter-the beautiful British intelligence agent first
encountered in The Short Forever-arrives in New York to
begin an investigation of her own; Stone suspects that her
case is strangely connected to the dead husband. And he and
Dino, his former NYPD partner, are set to face the most
bizarre and challenging assignment of their very colorful
careers.
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