Ah – it’s spring time and all of the writers who crank out summer mental floss books are seeing their books hit the stores now. Stuart Woods new Stone Barrington novel – Two Dollar Bill – is out. Stone is my hero – an ex-cop turned “legal problem solver” (e.g. the law firm he’s associated with gives him the weird shit they don’t want to deal with) who gets laid constantly by the female protagonists but always manages to get involved in something that messes up his relationships. In the middle of the mess that is his personal life, he takes endless rafts of shit from his ex-cop-partner Dino (who is the son-in-law of a big time mafioso and – try as hard as he can to not end up being pegged for a cop – wears black rubber shoes, white socks, and eats donuts on stake outs.) Oh – and each book has a bad guy problem that Stone and Dino get mixed up in and inevitably have to solve through lots of car chases, stake outs, explosions, kidnapings, random killings, and eventually a complex plot twist.
I covered a lot of mileage this week – Boulder to Dallas to Palo Alto to Boston to Boulder – and decided that I deserved a Stone Barrington novel for the flight home from Boston (instead of email or something heavier, such as Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.) $29.50 later (the book and a powerbar for the flight) and I made four hours disappear.