Reviews for Shoot First

by Stuart Woods

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Stone Barrington and his wisecracking BFF, police commissioner Dino, find trouble again, this time at a Key West golf retreat for Barrington's employer, Steele Group. Within moments of hitting the first green, they find themselves under fire from a gunman aiming for board member Meg Harmon. Harmon's tech company is in the final stages of testing their driverless-car software, and her former business partner, Gino Bellini, is out to avenge what he feels was an unfair buyout. Unfortunately for him, Harmon and Barrington have hit it off, and Bellini's hit team is forced to track them on a round-robin tour of Barrington's estates, dodging the jet-setting attorney's seemingly endless supply of friends with elite military training. Readers will recognize early on that the deck is stacked in Barrington's favor, which steals a bit of the suspense, but Barrington's banter with Dino and the lure of diving into the hero's lavish lifestyle will satisfy those seeking a fast-paced escapist adventure.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2018 Booklist


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

New York attorney Stone Barrington (Unbound, 2018, etc.) moves deeper into James Bond territory in his increasingly unsuspenseful attempts to keep his latest paramour's cutting-edge technology from falling into the wrong hands.Years before she sold her startup, Harmony Software, to a business group including insurance mogul Arthur Steele and then met and slept with Stone during an outing in Key West that included a board meeting of the Steele Group, Meg Harmon had a torrid affair with Gino Bellini. The two became partners; Bellini developed the software for an unusually resourceful self-driving car; Meg, her ardor cooled, edged him out of the company with a $150 million payout. When a sniper interrupts Stone and Meg's round of golf at Key West by shooting someone in the next foursome, Meg thinks the disgruntled Gino just might be behind it. She's right, of course: Gino and his conniving wife, Veronica, have hired an equally malevolent pair of killers, Dirty Joe Cross and his girlfriend, Jungle Jane Jillian, to exact condign revenge. In the hands of another writer, the threats from such well-heeled villains would be bound to create suspense. But this is Stoneland, where no one you care about is ever in enough danger to distract Stone from his primary mission: wandering the planet purchasing everything that isn't nailed down (the list this time includes a Key West house, club membership, slip, and boat, in that order). Not even the news that Stone can't force Gino to relinquish the Harmony Software designs he's stolen because he's already sold them to an international arms dealer turns up the heat: Stone just turns his sights from private malefactors to the dealer in illegal arms and the sinister political regimes behind him. Starved for anything more consequential to do, Stone enjoys even more sex than usual, watched several times through a hidden camera by someone who intends to shoot Meg and maybe him as well. The only people who get killed are the killers, and Meg's kidnapping ends almost before it's begun.Sleep tight, children: There's nothing here to spoil your dreams.


Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

At the start of bestseller Woods's smooth 45th Stone Barrington novel (after Unbound), business takes the wealthy New York lawyer to Key West, Fla., where he meets Silicon Valley entrepreneur Meg Harmon, whose company has recently developed software for a self-driving car. Unfortunately, a former partner of Meg's, Gino Bellini, feels she cheated him out of his fair share of the profits from the software design, and sets a pair of assassins on her trail. In between dodging bullets first on a golf course and then on a beach, Meg and Stone find time to get to know each other and have great sex. They later retreat to Stone's Manhattan townhouse, though trips on Stone's private plane to his place in Maine and his house in the English countryside also prove necessary for their safety. No surprise, Stone and his allies thwart Gino and assorted other bad guys with relative ease. As usual, the principal pleasure lies in watching the suave, resourceful Stone maintain his good humor and high lifestyle through- out all his travails. Author tour. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Back