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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
Reprinted with permission. Do Not
repost without permission from the author, Harriet
Klausner
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