Short Straw (Ed Eagle Series #2) by Stuart Woods

From the Publisher

OUR FAVORITE LEGAL EAGLE RETURNS.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR STUART WOODS CONTINUES WHAT HE STARTED IN SANTA FE RULES:

Stuart Woods delivers a compulsively readable novel of crosses and double-crosses, featuring a shrewd criminal lawyer and his shamelessly sexy wife-a true black widow.

Publishers Weekly

At the start of this taut tale of a very bad woman out to fleece a very good man from bestseller Woods, Santa Fe, N.Mex., lawyer Ed Eagle wakes up one morning with a terrible hangover and a missing wife. After a few phone calls, it turns out that not only has his wife, Barbara, disappeared, she's in the process of taking $5 million of his money with her. Ed, who met Barbara in an earlier Woods novel, Santa Fe Rules (1992), knew she was a shady character, but she was also beautiful and fabulous in bed so he married her. He hires a couple of PIs to find her, but every time they catch up with the unrepentant Barbara, she shakes them off and gets away. She's the most compelling character in the book, willing to go to any lengths, including murder, to keep the money. Scarcely an excess word gets in the way of the briskly moving plot. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

One look at his bedside clock, and attorney Ed Eagle knows he's in trouble. He's overslept on the day of his office's grand opening. But this fact quickly pales as he learns the reason for his tardiness: his wife drugged him the night before. Moreover, she has left him and ostensibly cleaned out his bank accounts. And so begins Woods's latest thriller, which revisits characters and settings introduced in Santa Fe Rules. The author's fans, as well as other readers who revel in the plot-driven novel, will no doubt enjoy this fast-moving tale of Eagle's multifront campaign to retrieve his monetary fortunes, escape assassination, defend a guilty client, and win the affections of a lovely young starlet who moves to town. There isn't much character development or a sense of place here. For all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.] Nancy McNicol, Ora Mason Branch Lib., West Haven, CT Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Whatever happy years Ed Eagle may have enjoyed after marrying Barbara Kennerly (Santa Fe Rules, 1992) vanished the moment he woke up on his 50th birthday to find that she'd cleaned him out and taken a powder. What does Santa Fe's top trial attorney do when he learns that his wife's vamoosed with four million of his favorite dollars? Call out reinforcements, that's what. After he's done what he can to freeze the assets Barbara's been busily transferring to offshore accounts, Ed gets Cupie Dalton, ex-LAPD, to follow her to Mexico City. When Barbara plugs Cupie while he's trying to put her on the phone with her beloved hubby, Ed digs deeper and comes up with Vittorio, an Apache shamus he thinks can scare Barbara into signing her name to six blank sheets of paper. And so the chase is on, with every character, as usual with Woods, acting exactly the same in every situation. Since the situations involve constant attempts to outguess, outwit and betray each other, however, the story develops an agreeable comic rhythm. And that also goes for a subplot that kicks in when Ed, back home in Santa Fe, is assigned the defense of Joe Big Bear, an alleged triple killer whose alibi witnesses sound so convincing that Ed can't imagine why he's still in jail. Like Cupie's discovery of Barbara, Ed's successful defense of Big Bear is only the opening move in a lightning-fast game marked by a hundred featherweight twists. Without ever making you care about any of these people or creating any complications that last more than a few chapters, Woods keeps them all moving smartly around the playing board like so many checkers. The result, shorn of the franchise cheerleading that's sunk Stone Barrington's latestadventures (Dark Harbor, 2006 etc.) in stagnant self-approbation, is Woods's most entertaining tale in years.

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