DESPERATE MEASURES

Consumer alert: Sleeping with Stone Barrington (Turbulence, 2018, etc.) can be hazardous to your health.

Moments after accepting his dismissal by model Kelly Smith at the East Side Heliport, Stone literally bumps into pilot Faith Barnacle. He apologizes for jostling her and incidentally salves his wounded ego by giving her a lift back to Midtown, offering her a job as his personal pilot and head of his flight department, and taking her to bed. Since Faith has indicated a limit of three intimate encounters before she dumps any man, Stone stops at two. It’s no big deal, and besides, there are bigger fish to fry. New York is being terrorized by a killer who stalks, strips, rapes, and strangles beautiful blondes, then scrupulously cleans and redresses them and dumps them. Faith is scared, but she’s also independent. Even after Stone provides her with Jimbo, a minder from the security firm Strategic Services, she sneaks out of her Turtle Bay apartment in search of soap and promptly gets kidnapped. Inconsolable, Stone consoles himself with Priscilla Scott, an aspiring divorcée who literally falls into his lap while he’s sitting in a luggage store, and recently widowed Edith Beresford, whose ex-husband had the decency to die before he could change the will leaving her everything. Donald Trask, the hedge fund manager Priscilla is divorcing, is a violent man with a short temper, but Stone is Stone, and although Priscilla gets stabbed to death shortly after the divorce, hours after changing her own will, Stone doesn’t, and NYPD Detective Sean Muldoon (the smart one) and Dante Calabrese (the kid) can’t help regarding him as a prime suspect. Still on the horizon are deputy mayor Caroline Whitehorn and her highly competitive and equally beautiful sister. Anything might happen with them.

A serial killer, a violent abduction, an acrimonious divorce, the hero suspected of murder—and all of it serenely weightless, in the episodic manner of a Road Runner cartoon without the laughs. Who cares what happens to the most alluring woman when the next one is just around the corner?