TWO DOLLAR BILL

Jet-setting New York attorney Stone Barrington (Reckless Abandon, 2004, etc.) proves that you just can’t be too careful about who you take into your house.

Even though he’s hazy about the reasons, Texas businessman Billy Bob Barnstormer has blown into the Big Apple convinced he needs a lawyer, and he has 50,000 reasons why he deserves help. Bill Eggers, the managing partner of Woodman & Weld, knows Billy Bob is outside his comfort zone, but he sees no reason why Stone, of counsel to W&W, shouldn’t help him, even to the extent of putting his new client up for the night. Big mistake. Billy Bob, it turns out, is a man of many names—Rodney Peeples, Whitney Stanford, Harlan Wilson, Jack Jeff Kight [sic]—who takes advantage of Stone’s hospitality to broil a steak Stone had been saving for a special someone, bring home a hooker and strangle her, place bugs all over the department, plant an embarrassingly hot handgun on his host and swindle him out of that $50,000. Stone’s current cookie-cutter romance with beautiful Tiffany Baldwin, the new U.S. Attorney for New York, puts him between the law and his client. But even after he’s wriggled off the hook as Billy Bob’s legal representative, his troubles continue. His erstwhile client, who’s much, much more than a common con artist, goes on a spree that suggests his only joy in life is giving ebullient Stone problems. Even when Stone’s former lover Arrington Carter Calder replaces Tiff in his bed, the instinctive warmth between them (“they came together as if they had never been apart”) is only a setup for more high-concept skullduggery and condign retaliation.

How does Woods keep churning out bestsellers? By taking exceptional pains not to adulterate the formula with any new character types, plot twists or ideas.