Loitering with Intent(Stone Barrington Series, 16)
Stuart Woods, 209
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451228567
Summary
Dumped by his glamorous Russian girlfriend during dinner at Elaine's, and running low on cash, Stone Barrington is having a bad week. So his luck seems to be improving when he's hired to locate the missing son of a very wealthy man—lucky because the job pays well, and because the son is hiding in the tropical paradise of Key West.
But when Stone and his sometime running buddy Dino Bacchetti arrive in the sunny Keys, it appears that someone has been lying in wait. When Stone very nearly loses his life after being blindsided at a local bar, he realizes that the young man he's been hired to track may have good reason for not wanting to be found.
Suddenly Key West is looking less like Margaritaville and more like the mean streets of New York. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1938
• Where—Manchester, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Georgia
• Awards—Edgar Award for Chiefs, 1981; Grand Prix de
Litérature Policière for Imperfect Strangers, 1995
• Currently—lives in Key West, Florida; Mt. Desert, Maine;
New York City
Stuart Woods was born in 1938 in Manchester, Georgia. After graduating from college and enlisting in the Air National Guard, he moved to New York, where he worked in advertising for the better part of the 1960s. He spent three years in London working for various ad agencies, then moved to Ireland in 1973 to begin his writing career in earnest.
However, despite his best intentions, Woods got sidetracked in Ireland. He was nearly 100 pages into a novel when he discovered the seductive pleasures of sailing. "Everything went to hell," he quips on his web site "All I did was sail." He bought a boat, learned everything he could about celestial navigation, and competed in the Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) in 1976, finishing respectably in the middle of the fleet. (Later, he took part in the infamous Fastnet Race of 1979, a yachting competition that ended tragically when a huge storm claimed the lives of 15 sailors and 4 observers. Woods and his crew emerged unharmed.)
Returning to the U.S., Woods wrote two nonfiction books: an account of his transatlantic sailing adventures (Blue Water, Green Skipper) and a travel guide he claims to have written on a whim. But the book that jump-started his career was the opus interruptus begun in Ireland. An absorbing multigenerational mystery set in a small southern town, Chiefs was published in 1981, went on to win an Edgar Award, and was subsequently turned into a television miniseries starring Charlton Heston.
An amazingly prolific author, Woods has gone on to pen dozens of compelling thrillers, juggling stand-alone novels with installments in four successful series. (His most popular protagonists are New York cop-turned-attorney Stone Barrington, introduced in 1991's New York Dead, and plucky Florida police chief Holly Barker, who debuted in 1998's Orchid Beach.) His pleasing mix of high-octane action, likable characters, and sly, subversive humor has made him a hit with readers—who have returned the favor by propelling his books to the top of the bestseller lists.
Extras
• His first job was in advertising at BBDO in New York, and his first assignment was to write ads for CBS-TV shows. He recalls: "They consisted of a drawing of the star and one line of exactly 127 characters, including spaces, and I had to write to that length. It taught me to be concise.
• He flies his own airplane, a single-engine turboprop called a Jetprop, and tours the country every year in it, including book tours.
• He's a partner in a 1929 motor yacht called Belle and spends two or three weeks a year aboard her.
• In 1961-62, Woods spent 10 months in Germany with the National Guard at the height of the Berlin Wall Crisis.
• In October and November of 1979, he skippered a friend's yacht back across the Atlantic, with a crew of six, calling at the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands and finishing at Antigua in the Caribbean. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Never one to avoid a glamorous vacation spot, Stone Barrington travels to Key West, Fla., in this easygoing entry in bestseller Woods's long-running series (Hot Mahogany, etc.) to feature the New York cop turned lawyer. Stone is supposed to track down Evan Keating, a young man whose signature is needed on documents allowing his father to sell the family business, except that Evan doesn't want to be found and when he is, doesn't want to sign the papers. Meanwhile, there's always time to enjoy good food and romance. Stone and Dino Bacchetti, his former NYPD partner, eat a lot of conch, while a beautiful Swedish doctor, Annika Swenson, learns the hard way that being involved with Stone is the most dangerous job in America. Woods handles the proceedings with dispatch and good humor, the pages fly by, and contented readers will sit back and eagerly await the next installment.
Publishers Weekly
After a less than thrilling turn in Hot Mahogany (2008), Stone Barrington is back in top form with this twist-filled page-turner.... An exciting entry in prolific Woods’ long-running series.
Booklist
Beneath the excruciatingly apt title lurks a welcome return to detection, more or less, for jet-setting New York attorney Stone Barrington. Offered a hefty sum to sell the family business, chemist Warren Keating has already won the reluctant blessing of his ancient father Eli. But company rules require him to get the permission of his son as well. That's a bit awkward, because Warren hasn't seen Evan since the boy's college graduation five years ago, and a recent postcard Evan sent from Key West doesn't sound as if it's laying the groundwork for a reunion. Deputized to fly to Key West and get Evan's signature on the appropriate documents, Stone packs light—an easy job since his girlfriend, Tatiana Orlovsky, has just returned to her unworthy husband. With the help of his ex-partner Lt. Dino Bacchetti and Dino's old buddy Lt. Tommy Sculley, who retired from the NYPD to police Key West, Stone quickly traces Evan to a convenient barstool, makes his pitch and gets decked for his trouble—not by Evan, but by his enterprising girlfriend Gigi Jones. Stone awakens to find comely Dr. Annika Swenson bending over him. Since she doesn't have any American hang-ups about sex, she's soon putting Stone through his paces, leaving him panting for sleep and another round of conch fritters. Meanwhile, Evan's schoolmate Charley Boggs has been identified as a likely drug mule, then becomes a murder victim, and Evan has accused his father of poisoning his later brother Harry, who ran the company, and trying to hire a hit man to kill Evan. For a while everything seems confusing and uncertain. Luckily for Stone's legion of fans, the guilt is swiftly fixed to a professional killer you just know is going to be left free at journey's end to decimate the casts of future Stone adventures. Middling for this wildly uneven series. Readers who quit halfway through won't miss a thing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Loitering with Intent:
1. What kind of character is Evan Keating? Why does he seem to be the target of other's schemes?
2. Why is Evan so illusive and then uncooperative when Stone finally tracks him down? What did you come to suspect about Evan? Do his alibi's pan out...or is he lying?
3. What is the reason that Evan's girlfriend attacks Stone? Is an explanation ever offered?
4. How 'bout that Swedish doctor? An charming diversion to the plot...or tiresome and dispensible?
5. At what point did you begin to suspect that Warren Keating might be on the up and up? Were you stumped by all the twists and turns the story takes?
6. Do you find the ending satisfying...does it wrap up all the loose ends and offer a few suprises along the way? Or did you find the end predictable...with a few explanations still missing?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page