From Publishers Weekly
Woods's latest (after Palindrome ) is a slick thriller set in Manhattan's Upper East Side, the stomping ground of Stone Barrington, a well-bred but unpretentious detective who, in a city of several million people, always ends up in the right place at the right time. Late one evening, as Stone trudges home from Elaine's Restaurant, popular TV newscaster Sasha Nijinsky plummets 12 stories from her terrace and lands on a heap of dirt 20 yards away from him--remarkably, still alive. Stone fails to apprehend the person who flees Sasha's penthouse and, after the ambulance carrying her collides with a fire truck, Sasha herself disappears. Despite the fact that no corpse is in evidence, the baffled NYPD eagerly pins a murder rap on Sasha's distraught lesbian lover. Stone refuses to accept his colleagues' pat solution and even maintains that Sasha might have survived thanks to skydiving training and her billowing, parachute-like robe. Bed-hopping TV newspeople, a sexy blonde judge sporting a red dress beneath her robes, a serial killer targeting cabbies and a creepy med-school dropout turned mortician who idolizes Sasha romp through this calculatedly melodramatic crime story all the way to its grisly B-movie finale. 75,000 first printing; $125,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Silky-smooth cop-thriller, Woods's first since Chiefs (1981)- -only this one's set not in the author's usual deep South (Palindrome, 1990; Grass Roots, 1989, etc.), but in N.Y.C., where Stone Barrington, lawyer-turned-cop, must solve the case of a skydiving celebrity. It's a case because veteran-skydiver/TV-news-star Sasha Nijinsky wasn't wearing a parachute when she dove from her 12th- story penthouse as Stone, passing by, watched in horror. Was she pushed? Stone wants to ask her but can't--not because she's dead, although everyone but Stone assumes she is (he thinks her skydiving skills may have kept her alive), but because she's missing: the ambulance that picked her up crashed, and when the smoked cleared, Nijinsky was gone. The police brass want Stone to find her or her body fast--and whoever might have pushed her. Stone combs the city (drawn in high glitz as the action veers from Elaine's to the Four Seasons to the U.N. Plaza) and digs out three likely culprits: snooty Barron Harkness, whose TV-anchorship Nijinsky coveted (and whose sexy assistant, Cary Hilliard, soon shares Stone's bed); creepy Herbert Van Fleet, an upscale necrophiliac undertaker who'd written thousands of love letters to Nijinsky; and stoical Hank Morgan, a lesbian makeup artist who was carrying on with the missing star. When evidence points to Morgan, the brass, hungry to close the case, railroad her arrest--leading to her suicide and, because of his expected protest, to Stone's dismissal from the force. Embittered, Stone hires on with a top law firm, only to work on a case that shows him the dark side of sexy Cary--but not nearly as dark as what awaits him when he gets a written invitation from Nijinsky to join her in Van Fleet's secret chamber of horrors.... Stylish suspense among the gray-flannel/black-velvet set, with a winsome hero and agreeable dollops of sex, gore, and demented mayhem: Woods's best since Under the Lake. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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