Reviews for Choppy water

Publishers Weekly
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Secretary of State Holly Barker is elected president in bestseller Woods’s exciting 54th Stone Barrington novel (after Hit List). New York lawyer Stone immediately invites Holly, his longtime paramour, to spend a week at his house in Islesboro, Maine. Holly and Stone secretly travel with a Secret Service detail to the island, where the next day they sneak out of the house and go for a sail. On their return, they discover that six agents have been shot to death. Who could have known Holly was on the island? Meanwhile in Virginia, bigoted Wade Sykes (“having a woman as president was bad, having two in a row is intolerable”) and his henchmen remain determined to assassinate her. They have a mole inside Holly’s transition team who knows her schedule, but fortunately the FBI has an undercover agent inside Sykes’s group. The tension mounts as Stone and his allies attempt to keep Holly safe, and Sykes and company maneuver to get a sniper in place at one of her public appearances. The action builds to a satisfying double climax. With its high political stakes, this is one of the better recent entries in this long-running series. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit. (Aug.)


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Being president-elect of the United States is no bed of roses for former Secretary of State Holly Barker, who’s marked for assassination even before she takes the oath of office. Retired Army Col. Wade Sykes, aka Watchman, and his white supremacist cabal, who’ve somehow managed to tolerate the presidency of Katharine Lee, have drawn a line in the sand since Holly was elected in the closing pages of Hit List (2020). Luckily, Holly has a secret weapon: her sometime lover Stone Barrington, the New York lawyer who survived his own targeting for death in the same installment. The first attempt on Holly’s life, which appropriately takes place during a secret vacation at Stone’s place in Dark Harbor, Maine, leaves six dispensable Secret Service agents dead but doesn’t muss Holly’s hair. So Sykes and company, nothing daunted, try again in a series of increasingly improbable locations. For all their pains, Holly, a longtime franchise character, is probably a lot safer than Elizabeth Potter, a brand-new undercover FBI agent who’s infiltrated Sykes’ inner circle without quite winning his unconditional trust. As she twists slowly in the wind, she notices that another Sykes intimate seems to be acting like a double agent too. Wonder how that will work out—especially given Stone’s bleak reflection that “it could be like this for the next eight years”? Despite the allegedly high stakes, Woods delivers all the facile thrills of an unusually sedate video game. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

No sooner has former Secretary of State Holly Barker been elected president than she’s repeatedly targeted for assassination. Exhausted and needing a break, she and Stone Barrington take off for his home in Maine. While they evade her protectors to go sailing, an aborted raid leaves six Secret Service agents dead. This sends Barker and Barrington briefly to his Key West home (he has many homes) before she’s called back to Washington, where more attempts are made on her life, even in the White House. Officials are certain that a small band led by right-wing ex-colonel Wade Sykes is behind the attempts, but they lack proof, even with FBI and CIA moles in Sykes' group trying to outsmart one another. Hasty wrap-up aside, this is prime Woods, with “serial monogamist” Barrington and his “irregular lover” Barker (in the words of Barrington's pal, New York Police Commissioner Dino Bacchetti) center stage, and the series set to take a more political bent. Slick, reliable, action-oriented escapism, just right for troubled times.

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