Click Here To Purchase Lucid Intervals: A Stone Barrington Novel

Author: Stuart Woods

Publisher: Putnam Adult
ISBN-10: 0399156445:  ISBN-13: 978-0399156441
 

 
It’s hardly necessary to critique a Stone Barrington novel for Stuart Woods’s fans. After 18 books in the series, Barrington has an extensive readership knowledgeable about all the nuances and characteristics of the New York attorney and his milieu.   For those who haven’t enjoyed the light fare of Barrington and his cronies, however, Lucid Intervals is a good introduction into what the books are all about.
 
Stone Barrington is an upper-crust Big Apple attorney who’s been part detective, part fixer, and sometimes counselor-at-law for a myriad of clients over the years. Normally, he has an easy time of it. He dines at the best restaurants, is rarely alone in bed, works the hours he likes, and has friends in seemingly every office of law enforcement. When an assignment crosses his desk, he pulls in the hired guns he needs and waits for the results to come in.      It’s a good thing he has so much going for him—as lucid intervals demonstrates, he rarely has just one plotline to deal with at any given time.
 
For example, Lucid Intervals opens with Barrington learning his unstable, knife-wielding ex-wife Dolce Bianci is stalking him again. At the same time, comic catastrophe Herbie Fisher pays Barrington a million-dollar retainer to keep him out of trouble, and he gets his money’s worth.  The central problem comes when British intelligence officer Felicity Devonshire, by day, hires Barrington to track down who she thinks is an ex-MI6 agent on the run. By night, the couple engage in more lightly described sex than the entire Bond canon. Along the way, Barrington enjoys the high-life—literally as he gets his pilot’s license for jet flying—and breezily moves from one digression to one red herring after another.
 
Suspense and literary tension are besides the point in these short romps. The stories are so episodic and the characters so thinly sketched that a reader can be forgiven for thinking they’re engaged in the print equivalent of a ‘70s TV series. The pleasures are the banter between the characters, the sudden shifts in direction, the strange befuddlement of Herbie Fisher, and the awareness all these matters will return in the next installment. Come on in, the wine is always served at just the right temperature . . .
 
       

Click Here To Purchase Lucid Intervals: A Stone Barrington Novel