Chiefs [Mass Market Paperback]

Stuart Woods (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 1999

In the winter of I 1920, the first body is found in Delano, Georgia-the naked, brutalized corpse of a young boy. It Is a crime too horrific to be ignored; the first of many that will span four decades, embroiling three separate police chiefs in a remarkable manhunt that will expose the hatreds, fears, dark secrets and festering wounds beneath the surface of their sleepy God-fearing community.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A fascinating, compelling tale."--" The New York times""Excellent"--" Roanoke Times and World News""Wonderful...Stuart Woods has written a classic!"-- "Pat Conroy"

About the Author

Stuart Woods was born in Manchester, Georgia, a small town in the American South. He was educated in the local schools and at the University of Georgia, where he graduated with a BA degree in 1959. He served in the United States Air Force, in which he says he "...flew a truck," as an enlisted man during the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961-62.

He devoted his early adult years to a career in advertising , as an award-winning writer for agencies in New York and London. It was while living in London in 1973 that he decided to pursue an ambition held since childhood, to write fiction. he moved to a flat in the stable yard of a castle in south County Galway, Ireland, and while working two days a week for a Dublin ad agency to support himself, began work on a novel. Shortly after beginning, he discovered sailing and , as he puts it, "Everything went to hell." The novel was put temporarily aside while he spent all his time, "...racing an eleven foot plywood dinghy against small children, losing regularly."

In the autumn of 1974, a friend invited him to help ferry a small yacht up the west coast of Ireland, and the bug bit even harder. Shortly thereafter, his grandfather died, leaving him "...just enough money to get into debt for a boat," and he immediately decided to go to the 1976 Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR). He moved to a gamekeeper's cottage on a river above Cork Harbour and had a boat built at a nearby boatyard. He studied navigation and sailed on other people's boats every chance he got, then, after completing a 1300-mile qualifying voyage from the Azores to Ireland, he persuaded the Race Committee to accept him as an Irish entry.

He completed the race in good form, taking forty-five days, and in 1977 his memoir of the Irish period, Blue Water, Green Skipper was published in London and New York. While sporadically working on the novel, he completed another book, A Romantic's Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland, published in 1979.

Chiefs, Woods' long-awaited novel, was published in 1981 to wide critical and popular acclaim, garnering excellent reviews and winning the Edgar Allan Poe Award. Chiefs was filmed for television as a six-hour drama starring Charlton Heston. Following his success with that novel, Woods published a string of fiction that established him as one of the most popular writers in the world.

Orchid Beach is Stuart Woods' eighteenth novel. His previous books, Run Before the Wind (1983), Deep Lie (1986), Under the Lake (1987), White Cargo (1988), Grass Roots (1989), Palindrome and New York Dead (1989), Santa Fe Rules (1991), L.A. Times (1992), Dead Eyes (1993), Heat (1994), Imperfect Strangers and Choke (1995), Dirt (1996), Dead in the Water (1997) and Swimming to Catalina (1998) have been translated into Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Japanese, and Hebrew and there are millions of copies of his books in print around the world. Several of Stuart Woods' novels have been optioned for feature films and television movies.

Stuart Woods lives on the the Treasure Coast of Florida and Litchfield County, Connectict. He still flies his own plane, and sails.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Avon (April 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380703475
• ISBN-13: 978-0380703470
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,030,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stuart Woods is the author of forty-four novels, including the New York Times-bestselling Stone Barrington series and Holly Barker series. The last twenty-eight of them have been New York Times best-sellers. He is an avid private pilot, flying his own jet on two book tours a year. His latest novel is Santa Fe Edge,to be published on September 21st. You may see his tour schedule and learn more about the author on his website, www.stuartwoods.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good crime novel plus a lot more, September 29, 2002

By 

Stan Vernooy (Henderson, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Chiefs (Mass Market Paperback)

"Chiefs" is the story of three police chiefs in a small Georgia town: one was the town's very first Chief of Police in the 1920's, the second in the 1940's, and the third in the 1960's. The common thread among the three is a series of disappearances of teenage boys who were traveling through the vicinity of the town when they disappeared.

The book isn't really a mystery, since the reader knows the solution to the crime fairly early in the book. What sets the book apart is the well-drawn characters and the unerring and evocative portrayal of the evolution of a small Georgia town from the 1920's up to the middle of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's.

Woods has perfect pitch when it comes to dialogue. Every conversation, every confrontation, every characterization rings vividly true. Politics, on a local, state, and national level, is a sub-theme of the book, and the author has obviously done his homework on those topics as well. But the book's most noticeable strength is in its ability to transport the reader almost physically into a sultry Georgia town. Even if you read this during a winter in North Dakota, you'll feel the heat, the tension, the passion, and the fears of a sleepy Georgia town during the mid-20th century for as long as you're reading "Chiefs".

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great southern novel, September 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Chiefs (Mass Market Paperback)

The characters in Chiefs are without a doubt some of the most interesting and well-developed characters that have ever surfaced in any novel to date. Woods does a great job creating such a diverse group of people all the while keeping them realistic and life-like. He paints a very accurate picture of what the south was like in the early 1900's and the 1950's. Since he created such life-like and believable people, I found myself either hating or loving the characters. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading. The three Chiefs that are the focal point are all very different, and they all have amazing qualities that make them come alive. Aside from holding the same position at one time or another, they also were committed to solving one of the worst series of crimes the south had ever seen.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's so damn good!, August 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Chiefs (Mass Market Paperback)

I got Chiefs after reading all the Amazon 5-star reader reviews. Usually, I'd walk on by a book about small town Georgia cops, never imagining it could be this enthralling. The author is masterful at drawing the reader into this little world; I found myself talking out loud to the characters. He doesn't rely on the graphic gore and language of the typical modern shock thriller, hence making the terror more real. What makes the southern authors so good!? This belongs with "Gone With the Wind" and "The Prince of Tides." As a serial killer story, it belongs with the best of Lawrence Sanders.