At the start of bestseller Woods's one-note 53rd Stone Barrington novel (after Treason), the fabulously rich New York attorney discovers that his name is on a hit list of 10 people, one of whom is soon shot dead while skating at Rockefeller Center's ice rink. Everyone on the list was an employee at one time at Strategic Services, a private security firm, except for Stone, though he had done consulting work for the company. A disgruntled former Strategic Services employee, Sig Larkin, emerges as the lone suspect. Stone's efforts to elude Larkin take him to various places where he owns houses, including England, Maine, and Santa Fe, N.Mex., but Larkin, who has recently won a fortune in the lottery, is able to match Stone's jet-setting pace. Romantic interludes with a couple of willing women provide Stone some respite from the cartoonish action until the climactic showdown on motorcycles. The book's high spot is Stone's reunion at the end with longtime paramour Holly Barker, who's running for president, which promises potential personal complications next time. This entry amounts to an extended chase scene. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)Due to a production error, this review originally published as a starred review.

It's no joke when Stone Barrington finds his name on a hit list of 10 men and women. Only after two of those listed have been killed, and Barrington has been shot at outside his Manhattan home, is the suspect identified. He's Sig Larkin, a former employee of the world's second-largest security company, where all of those on the list, except Barrington, once worked. But Barrington has ties to the company: the wife of a friend is the company's COO, and Barrington employs the firm's services. Feeling threatened, Barrington and friends take off for his homes in England, Paris, Santa Fe, and Maine, starting a cat-and-mouse game with the determined Larkin, who continues to rack up victims. Even the usually unscathed Barrington takes some minor hits before the chase finally ends. The book concludes with a presidential election in which former Secretary of State (and occasional Barrington bedmate) Holly Barker is a candidate, leaving the series poised for a shift in direction. Fast-moving easy reading in the familiar Woods style.

Stone Barrington under siege. Stone's name is the 10th and last on the list that crosses his desk. But since it's accompanied by an unsigned note that adds, "Dead, no special order, starting soon. Figure it out," he wastes no time shoring up his defenses. And a good thing too, since his nemesis straightaway shoots three other victims and makes three clean getaways, along the way breaching the perimeter of Stone's swanky East Side building and short-circuiting his security system. But Stone's idea of going to ground isn't quite the same as yours or mine. When Vanessa Baker, the baker he slept with in Treason (2020), phones him, he responds without ado to her overtures, and she's soon ensconced in his place. He huddles with his old NYPD partner, police commissioner Dino Bacchetti, and CIA director Lance Cabot to identify his aspiring executioner. His efforts, first to shake off, then to track down the predator, lead him and his Gulfstream 500 to his estate in England, to his place in Cold Harbor, Maine, and eventually to Santa Fe. When he's attacked by a hired killer during a shopping trip in Turnbull & Asser, he shoots the assailant, then seeks to apply pressure that will lead him to the paymaster. He even finds time to proposition Holly Barker, the secretary of state whose presidential campaign would be mortally wounded by news of any assignation with him. More people will die but not anyone you care about, and certainly not Stone, whom Dino describes, with pardonable understatement, as "the luckiest guy I know." Strictly for fans prepared to worry that Woods' highflying franchise hero may actually breathe his last this time. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.