Description:

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.

From 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.)
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From Booklist

Santa Fe defense lawyer Ed Eagle is the epitome of worldly success. He presides over a highly successful practice, which is moving into showcase quarters overlooking Santa Fe's Governor's Palace. He loves his work. He loves his wife. But, when he wakes up on the morning of his fiftieth birthday, he discovers his wife has left him and taken him for a cool million. The second shock Eagle receives is news that a local lawyer has blown his brains out in the courthouse, after murdering his wife and children. The plot races off in two directions: with two edgy characters, an ex-LAPD detective and an Apache Indian tracker, whom Eagle hires to find his wife in Mexico; and with Eagle's efforts to clear a man wrongly charged, he believes, with a triple homicide. Woods keeps the wattage high as the two plots intersect, and Eagle finds himself more and more entangled in a deadly criminal scheme. The homicidal desperation of Eagle's wife and the dodginess of the men he sends after her keep the surprises coming. Woods first introduced Eagle in 1992, in Santa Fe Rules. He was then, and still is, a fascinatingly flawed character. Connie Fletcher
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