From Amazon.com
Stuart Woods's lean, taut thrillers typically feature a helping of Hollywood glitz along with a suave, sophisticated hero who gets his man and usually the girl, too. His newest is a convincing variation on that formula, featuring an eminently decent, likable hero we've met before in a couple of legal thrillers (
Run Before the Wind,
Grass Roots). Now Will Lee is a senator from Georgia with somewhat ambivalent aspirations to the presidency; think Bill Clinton with a stronger moral center and a more conventional marriage, to a smart, sexy wife named Kate, who happens to be a high-ranking CIA executive. When the sitting vice president, who's slated to be the party's standard-bearer in the upcoming election, tells Will in confidence that he's just been diagnosed with early Alzheimer's disease, Will decides to make the run of the title. That's good news for an imprisoned former CIA agent (think Aldrich Ames) who was Kate Lee's mentor in the agency; he knows his only possible chance for a pardon is Will's election, and he has enough dirt on the senator's rivals to blackmail them into getting out of the way. Throw in a right-wing fanatic with a long-standing grudge against Will and a determination to assassinate him before he can make it to the White House, and you have all the ingredients for a successful run at the bestseller list. But while Woods's many fans will cheer for both the author and his protagonist, that may not be enough to vault this one to the top; Will doesn't seem to have the requisite fire in the belly, and neither does Woods in what is ultimately a fairly tepid read.
--Jane Adams
From Publishers Weekly
The prolific Woods returns to his roots with an unexceptional new episode in his Lee family saga, a series dormant since 1989. Will and Kate Lee, now a Washington power couple, decide to go for broke in their service to the country. Will, a popular senator from Georgia, jumps into the race for the presidency, while Kate, a deputy director at the CIA, cheers him on. Will is for the most part about as likable as a politician can be, and boasts impeccable Democratic stripes. The Republicans try to stir up trouble by rehashing Will's sexual dalliance with a movie star nearly a decade earlier and raise questions about his competency as a lawyer on a rape and murder case many years ago. Will deflects those charges, but other problems are brewing. The candidate's liberal leanings are anathema to a right-wing militia group from Idaho, whose leader, Zeke Tennant, tracks Will from one campaign stop to another with a duffel bag full of weapons. In a final showdown, Tennant makes one last assassination attempt, this time while Will debates his Democratic primary challenger at Ford's Theater in the nation's capital. This fourth entry in the Lee family story, launched in 1981 with the Edgar-winning Chiefs, sparks from time to time but never catches fire. Lee would probably make a great president, but as a character he's all smooth surface, no edge and not very compelling. Worse, his run for the presidency lacks any real suspense. The assassin is too much of a bumbler to take seriously, and the Republicans' dirty tricks fizzle out quickly. For edge-of-the-seat drama, Woods (Worst Fears Realized) tries to inject energy into the uncertainty of the delegate-counting process at the party convention. Even political junkies won't get a rise out of that. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
