CLASS ACT

Has Stone Barrington finally bedded a woman too lethal?

Readers eager to find out will have to make it past the opening movement, in which the New York attorney most welcomed at high-end establishments is unaccountably eclipsed by Mickey O’Brien, a retired NYPD detective whose gambling problem has gotten him into serious trouble with both his creditors and his mother, restaurant heiress Louise O’Brien O’Brien, who swears this is the very last time she’ll bail him out. She showers him with money she was going to leave him in her will, and Mickey, breaking every rule in the suspense writer’s playbook, pays everybody off. Fans who’ve noticed Woods’ recent habit of pairing with other writers might suspect that these opening chapters had been ghostwritten if Mickey didn’t instantly indulge in Stone’s favorite habits: binge-buying upscale lifestyle commodities and seducing the women making them (and themselves) available. Tired, happy, and sexually sated, Mickey abruptly recedes, clearing the way for Stone to step back into the escalating tussle over who has the strongest claim to the $1 million the late criminal mastermind Eduardo Buono gave Jack Coulter, back when he was Johnny Fratelli, to watch Buono’s back in Sing Sing. At length Stone’s path crosses that of nightclub singer Hilda Ross, who moonlights as a contract killer. Other limbs cross, and consigliere Sal Trafficante, who works with Don Antonio Datilla and plays with Hilda, takes baleful note. Will Sal kill Stone? Will Stone kill Sal? Will Hilda kill one or both of them? The only way to resolve these burning questions, it seems, is to bring in Mickey O’Brien one last time.

No more shapeless than usual but definitely weirder.